M.M.A. -Massive Mesh Ambitions- Special Feature #02 / Kyoko Ozawa, “Libertin of the Void—The Extralegal Spaces of the City and the Body” English version also available

A media project to speculate and discuss about GHOST IN THE SHELL “M.M.A. -Massive Mesh Ambitions-.”

 

The theme of ISSUE #02 is “Outlaw.”
Kyoko Ozawa, “Libertin of the Void—The Extralegal Spaces of the City and the Body” is now available in English.

 

“After passing through the folds of a faraway labyrinth, you have finally arrived.”

This is not the soliloquy of a genius ghost hacker who exuded his fearlessness when he was cornered at the end of an intense cyber battle with Major Motoko Kusanagi.──Rather, it is the opening sentence of the timeless classic novel “The Face of Another,” written by novelist Kobo Abe and later made into a film by Hiroshi Teshigahara.

 

Folds── Kyoko Ozawa, an art historian whose main areas of expertise are cities and architecture, is also known for her theories on “handsome men” and “visual kei,” but seems to have always focused on “folds.” Ozawa’s journey through the “folds of the far labyrinth” of “Ghost in the Shell” leads to cities that appear in the work, such as Newport City and Chinatown in the Etorofu Special Economic Development Zone, and the extralegal gaps lurking within the technologically closely connected “post-human” body; it is an external void, a “frontier folded into the interior.”

 

The brief libertinage is generated by “the frontier within,” which is also the title of Kobo Abe’s monumental essay. This is intertwined with the inherent outlaw nature of technology and causes various accidents in the world of “Ghost in the Shell.” After encountering trouble, the story turns into an outlaw without remorse.

 

This article can be described as a record of a speculative stroll in which I wandered, armed with a burnt-out map, exploring the “frontiers” that the story has yet to reach.