Two recent books in theatre and performance studies, Japanese Robot Culture: Performance, Imagination, and Modernity and New Media Dramaturgy: Performance, Media and New-Materialism, both contribute to important and growing conversations around nonhuman performance and the relationship between technology and the contemporary subject. I say both theatre and performance studies because each book situates its project within both fields. For Japanese Robot Culture, the robot is theatrical because “the popular view of the robot in Japan is expressed in terms of the operations of theatre, through concepts such as representation, actor, audience, and setting or mise en scène” (1). The robot is “also performative in the sense that the mainstream notion of the robot in Japan is imaginatively maintained through socially enacted reinterpretations and recreations” (1). To put this another way, the “book focuses on the ‘performing’ robot in both its actuality and as a potent figure of the social imaginary” (2) and does so through the examination of staging and other theatrical operations. Similarly, New Media Dramaturgy is concerned with both performances that might be considered “theatre” (in the sense that they take place in a performance space with spectators present) and also the performative relationship between the contemporary subject and the technology that often rules our lives.

Japanese Robot Culture is the more specialized of the two books, appealing mostly to scholars interested in robot performance or contemporary Japanese popular culture. However, aspects of this book will appeal to scholars in other disciplines, such as gender studies or aging studies, as well as those interested in phenomenological questions, such as the relationships between objects in performance and the spectators who, in a sense, perform with them. New Media Dramaturgy certainly has a broader scope and will likely intersect with more fields and scholarly interests, as it is about technology in contemporary performance and is not limited to a specific type of technological performance or even geographical location. Scholars interested in contemporary performance art, video games, or robots, as well as those interested in installation art, photography, or theatrical design (especially lighting and sound), will find something of value here. However, as a survey of new media in performance, New Media Dramaturgy also does not spend as much time on each performance site as much as a more specialized book would.

Eckersall et al. of New Media Dramaturgy highlight “a tension between new media as an enabling part of everyday life and culture, and as something that threatens it” (2). Focusing mostly on ways in which “the inclusion and use of technical elements—as key players in each work's dramaturgy—alters the dramaturgical landscape” (3; emphasis in original), the authors cleverly use the abbreviation “NMD” to mean both “new media dramaturgy” and “new materialist dramaturgy.” New materialism here means the notion that matter is “agential,” a definition that allows the authors to examine relations “between non-human processes and cultural practice” (10).

The most compelling example of NMD in the book, for me, is their study of a mobile game called Karen made by the UK-based group Blast Theory. Noting the similarities to the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her, the authors ask of Karen: What does it mean when an artwork “can invade the private space of the mobile phone, and therefore enter our personal world” (173)? The Karen mobile app, featuring a title character played by actress Claire Cage, is described as a ten-day life coach that interacts with the user by asking personal questions and giving the user a glimpse of her own private life. Over the course of the ten days, the app will send notifications inviting the player to engage with the performance; the player can choose how to respond to Karen, slowly developing an intimacy with the performer. At the end of the ten days, Karen will then provide the user with a data report—a kind of psychological profile of the user based on their interactions with the app. The purpose, for Eckersall et al., is “to make a comment on the industrial-scale mining and processing of behavioural data and its storage and onselling for commercial use, and also on our willing participation in or submission to or complicity with this” (178). This is simply, in miniature, “what we do in social media every day” (180). Karen is thus a good example of the authors’ aforementioned project of “highlight[ing] a tension between new media as an enabling part of everyday life and culture, and as something that threatens it” (2).

Japanese Robot Culture is also about the tensions at work between technology as both the cure and cause of many contemporary problems. Speaking of robots who work as companions for the elderly, for instance, Sone writes of a story told by Japanese roboticist Michio Okada, who saw an elderly woman alone in a park talking to a small social robot. In this moment, Okada experienced “guilt, pity, and a sense of embarrassment, as well as, contradictorily, a positive attitude that he was witnessing a (normal) episode in a contemporary, technologised society” (205). For Sone, this is indicative of “both the underside of the new everyday normality that roboticists wish to see develop—and the loneliness of modern life that they perhaps also wish to ameliorate with the solution of companion robots” (205). Without being too reductive of either book's arguments, in reading both books together for this review, it struck me that there is a similarity here between modernity both as cause and cure in Sone's work and “new media as an enabling part of everyday life and culture, and as something that threatens it” (2) in the work of Eckersall et al.

This loneliness of modernity is expressed best in Sone's study of otaku (roughly translated as “nerd”) culture and the avatar of Hatsune Miku. Hatsune Miku is a digital girl who is part of a software suite that allows the user to write songs to which Hatsune Miku will then sing and dance. Sone describes how many otaku (mostly men) develop sexual feelings for Hatsune Miku, which Sone relates to conversations about robots in the West, where there is a long history of female robots who exist purely as objects for the male gaze. Since Hatsune Miku is a sixteen-year-old girl, the older male otaku, knowing his feelings might be considered perverse, then performs otaku-ness in self-consciously recognizing himself as a “‘dame’ (useless or hopeless) person who cannot resist his ‘pathetic’ attraction to the cartoon images of young girls” (158). Through the self-conscious performance of otaku, the label works “to represent and protect the person who wears it” (158), positioning both the digital avatar and the self-conscious otaku who “cannot” resist her as performers.

Japanese Robot Culture is about much more than just the loneliness of modernity, but I focus on these examples not only because I find them particularly compelling, but because they serve as effective companion examples to New Media Dramaturgy, which is also situated amid the tensions between technology as something to be celebrated and as the cause of many of the problems it then seeks to solve. Both books are part of the new technological landscape in which we find ourselves and are valuable contributions to their fields.