Info
The stinging pain, the foul odor, the smooth texture, the craze of perspiring multitude, or the sense of the sun-burnt skin… These feelings are not often mediated as a reality even if the screen can offer us a reflection of any feeling; we are still surrounded by the pseudo-senses. Some twenty years ago, the world of internet seemed like a land of freedom; yet, it has been changed into a hegemonic world. The chaos of internet keeps on going by the data flooding like a second nature to people.
The impression of the paradox and emptiness in people’s lives has been increased by the gap between the reality and the world of data. Consequently, our sense of the real world has been cracked. At the beginning of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin stated – in the “age of mechanical reproduction” – that the work of art has been deprived of the aura. Were he still alive, what would he say about the contemporary era of internet?
The Cracks of Reality program aims – on one hand – to ironically represent the optimism with which we’ve been developing the new technologies to build the new systems of authority and profits – e.g. to get advanced weapons in arms race, and – on the other hand – to look at the new phenomenon of information chaos, similar to the disappearance of the aura in the age of mechanical reproduction.
curator: Junya Yamamine
screening at WRO Art Center
program:
Akihiko Taniguchi, Holly Herndon – Chorus
Masashi Yokota, Kioku Zenkei
Michiko Tsuda, She Would Come Back There to See Her Again on the Following Day #1
Michiko Tsuda, Occupants and King in the Configuration Forest – Defective Formal Logic #1
Shota Yamauchi, FLYING BREAD
Eriko Sonoda, Space is the Place
Noriko Koshida, on the shore of the desk
Noriko Koshida, something in the spiral world
SYNOPSIS
Akihiko Taniguchi, Holly Herndon, Chorus
This work is created as a Music Video for Chorus which is a single of American Musician Holly Herndon. Taniguchi expresses the melting of surface between reality and information space via the 3 dimensional scaned data of real life into cyber space. This audio-visual duet seems to project current human existence losing its standpoint toward truthfulness.
Masashi Yokota, kioku zenkei
Video shows ordinary landscape; it has definitely existed somewhere in the past and it also looks like someone’s memory. In Japanese “kioku” means memory and “zenkei” expresses panoramic view. These words were used for the title of this work which is created by the particular technique of stop motion animation of a paper sculpture made from printed images from each frame of a moving image. This work shows the animation of sculpture made of real space, but at same time, it is like to build a small monument of the artist’s memory.
Michiko Tsuda, She would come back there to see her again at the following day. #1
This work is a single channel version of the original two channel video installation by Michiko Tsuda. She has continued to express a blind spot of a perception with such media techniques, like positioning of camera or manipulation of view point without using CG. In this work, the two female figures are appearing like same person and moving at the same time but it is not the familiar mirrored image. This work is an experimental expression of the rhetoric of moving image made with the camera and composition.
Michiko Tsuda, Occupants and King in the Configuration Forest – Defective Formal Logic #1
Frame in frame technique is important for the theory for cinema. Tsuda uses it in a sharp and poetical way for criticizing the media-mediated vision. Blank frames and the frames of mirrors create the illusion of the space within the video image. The rhetoric is truly simple but audience is carried to a territory between truth and falseness.
Shota Yamauchi, FLYING BREAD
SMS, mail news and other information delivered by media often interrupt our daily time. The increase of information flying around via various media channels results in chopping up our daily ant the lost of feeling the continuity ofa seamless time. Our life is becoming fragmented by such a chaotic information environment. Yamauchi draw the hybrid animation of real figure of himself and 3DCG world. This persona is continously blown away in completely illogical way from one point to the other somewhere on the google map. This irrationally story looks like nonsense but it expresses our contemporary life within the chaotic datascape.
Eriko Sonoda, Space is the Place
Only life exists in my room. Image that would never be born without living, and my little corner of Space. The motion of symmetry, revolution and dissolution evolves into a melody of space and vision. Three dimentional depth, in other words, focusing on further changes and multiplicity within the space while exploiting the characteristics of an “angle”. Starting with the rhythm and symmetrical movements of #1, balance gradually crumbles and little by little the space develops another perspective.
Noriko Koshida, on the shore of the desk
This work was made by two cameras as a documentation film of the performance taking place on a desk. Koshida consistently aims to make a films with her particular “ one shot film” technique . Her works look like one-shot documentary films of performance at a glance. At the beginning of this work, two cameras are always there and parallel images are combined and shown simultaneously keeping the feeling of realness. But the crack of reality is expanding because of the use of such artist’s particular techniques, like the calculated camera work, arrangement of objects in the space or the composition of image.
Noriko Koshida, something in the spiral world
It is a performance documentation of a re-arrangement of the stacked white cubes. It looks like a seamless image but the trap of vision is gradually becoming to be shown. Koshida uses a particular technique that was implemented in the historical video art work Three Transitions (1973) by Peter Campus, that was created by overlaping the images simultanously taken by two cameras from the front and back side. Koshida revives the rhetoric of video art and at the same time she shows that we are still impressed by those classical techniques even if we are living in advanced technology world.