1229 | 341 | Making manga as a form of participative urban mobilities research and relational creativity | Christoph Schimkowsky

This presentation will reflect on the ongoing collaborative creative project of making a research-themed manga together with a Japanese artist, introducing the undertaking as a means of not only research communication, but also participative research. It will outline the experimental origins of the collaboration, which began as an attempt to capture the transformation of passenger experience on Tokyo’s notoriously crowded urban railway network during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking the form of a 4-page manga, the collaboration with the artist Amaebi, then a research participant, provided an academic and artistic way of making sense of the changes in city space and urban experience brought on by the accelerating pandemic, as well as facilitated ethnographic insights into the creative process which advanced a connected study on the design of visual media in Japanese public transport environments which my collaborator had been commissioned to create. Perhaps more importantly, the (remote) manga project also allowed for the continuation of rapport building with a research interlocutor at a time when COVID-19 made face-to-face interaction difficult, and eventually developed into a lasting collaborative creative and research partnership. Drawing on this collaborative creative experience, the presentation will reflect on the artist-researcher relationship, the blurring of responsibilities that characterise it, and examine the potentials and pitfalls of a collaboration between manga artist and mobilities researcher. _x000D_
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Required technological support: computer and projector.

Christoph Schimkowsky
University of Tokyo

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ID Abstract: 341