Dating back to the 12th century, the Tripitaka of Haeinsa took about sixteen years to be produced with all plates being of the same size and of a uniformly aligned style with regard to typography. After the scribes of the Tripitaka were bent to the normative discipline, it became possible for ‘mechanical' operators to complete the main advantage of writing. The situation is comparable to the Europe practice of woodblock-printed books, in which texts were engraved as an image. Considering its digitalization, however, the recently completed digital Tripitaka merely reproduced the image of the text, including neither the materials on which it is based nor the impressive spectacle of thousands of tablets lying on the shelves of Haeinsa Temple. It should be noted that the sacred is not reproducible because no image depletes real figures and no alphabet is written in the same exhausted manner.

Language falls within immanence or transcendence. It should then prompt philosophers. Considering approaches to the immanent theory of language, the "point of view" is immanent to dispose of any "extra-linguistic reality," following the exclusion of the two "realities" generally taken into account by the "transcendent" approaches. Among many others, Spinoza, in a particularly marked form, gives the example of a reflection on language as far as possible from any immanent perspective. The reverse is true for Hjelmslev: it is probably impossible to implement a more immanent-design language. Compared to these two opposing views, the position of Saussure will be appreciated at its true value. Finally, there is the permanence in the language: language in its permanent essence.

At a time when the use of electronic books is generalized with devices, such as the iPad or Kindle, reading books undergoes a great transformation ever known since the invention of printing by Gutenberg. Since I have promoted information semiotics — or semiotics of/by information technology — for some decades, it is time we should turn to the issue of transformation of reading. I take this issue in terms of hybrid reading: we read both paper books and e-books. This hybridization of reading requires a new semiotic approach of reading that can articulate types of semiosis involved both in reading the physical books and e-books, both in reading books and in reading other multimedia devices. In this paper, I will give my analysis on the work of a Japanese media-artist Masaki Fujihata, Beyond Pages (1995 collection ZKM), a major masterpiece considered as a classic of interactive art. My goal is to re-examine what is the semiosis of e-book. My purpose is to state that we do not yet know what an e-book is, or even what indeed a book is.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest the epistemological and archaeological implication of augmented city and inscription of it, which are actively being realized in the recent urban space creation, emerging from the historical changes of metapolis urbanization. From the point of reviewing the diachronic significance of the 21st century's urbanism and its relation with the rapid growth of information and communications technology and digital media, the paper describes how the digital media revolution has contributed to various new features of urban space, such as hypertextuality and hybridization. As a conclusion, this study brings a key question on how to re-articulate what might be written on a city, and also reconfigures our memories, both personal and collective, which make us obtain new sensations from the city.

This paper examines documentary image through narration and representation from Peirce's sign theory. The argument is that the documentary value of films comprises an art form where three semiotic levels of documentary image, namely expression, representation, and interpretation, are in coordination in order to produce a narrative world. Thus, a quest for meaning in life by virtue of documentary sign, rhematic/dicentic indexical sinsign, serves to discover truth with a scientific and artful way of narration and representation as a cognitive method. In particular, the paper argues that factual and fictional primary materials are used for representing reality which is commensurate with memory and narrative imagination.

Beginning in the modern era, both terms for the naked body and visual media expressing naked body varied in Japan. In Japanese traditional paintings, Japanese own language with the suffix ‘絵 e' was used, and after introducing western nude paintings, Kanji ‘裸體' combined with the suffix｢画｣was invented. ‘Nude' appeared in the dictionary in 1930 and it represented nude paintings on its own, without being combined with the suffix ‘絵 e' or ｢画. You will be able to understand the change in the perception of the body in Japan in the modern era, through the change of the Japanese representing terms for naked body or nude.

Recently, mobile films, made with phone cameras, are emerging as a new form of cinema. These films create alternative styles of representation and modes of reception. How do mobile films change the cultural form of cinema? This paper first analyzes their style of audio-visual images: the low-definition images, unique camera movement, and loss of distance between camera and subject that brings a new kind of realism to filmic representation. Second, this paper considers the audio-visual environment. By viewing images on a mobile phone, the spectators' audio-visual sense is fused with their tactual sense. Using the mobile phone as a linguistic shifter, the meanings of images change in accordance with the context of reception. Furthermore, these images circulate and are shared within the web space. Third, this paper points to the formal similarities of mobile film and early film. The relation between the styles of the attraction and showing, as well as the dynamic and multiple forms of their reception in early cinema, resonates with the relation between mobile films' representation and their reception. The above considerations provide a new approach to the history of cinema.

The purpose of this essay is to aim to classify the East Asian Films of the 1930's into the changing pattern of the behaviour. After all, to analyze this, it was very important to know that the body in the Films is very closely connected with the symptom of the contemporary times. If so, what is the behaviour in the Film? To make this question clearly, I first intend to consider the idea about “underlying” the body on the film. As a result of this ‘Underlying', this would show that the Film desire the body. But the body is not the name for its own a person. As it were, it can be said that the body is not so much a person of a subject entirely contained within the individual will but a movement of an object entirely contained within the things on earth. If so, again, why does the Film want the movement or locomotion? This creates the message from the time. Thus, the Film and the Time have been become more and more pursued the movement as time-image, so that they put the behavior into the film. This implies that the Film reveal the concreted message through the movement which is materialized by the body in Film. The reason that the film wants the body is for the Mass as the movement.

In this article, I will adopt the term donghua in order to explore the historiographic trajectory in which Chinese animated films have been engaging, along with the socio-cultural transformation of Chinese modern society in the postwar era, and accompanied by the formation of a national identity within refashioned visual cultures and critiques. By revealing the struggle for the creativity and diversity of guohua, nianhua, and donghua, I aim to map out such invented visual traditions and the related socio-cultural significances in postwar China.