Possible Futures at the ICC

28 Nov 2005 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Features, Technology, Worldwide

The ICC in Shinjuku has capped a great year with an exemplary and comprehensive retrospective describing the way in which new Japanese art forms have kept pace with, and sometimes surpassed, postwar social and economic progress. The consistently excellent curatorial phenomenon that is the ICC (made possible in part by handsome exhibition budgets underwritten by telecommunications giant NTT), has struck a good balance with historical pieces on loan from the vaults of Japanese private collections and museums, while exploring a rich vein of more interactive Japanese new media. With Possible Futures, the result is a strong overview of the era since the myriad new forms of art in Japan began to intertwine with the fruits of postwar technology.

written by Tom Fryer all images taken with the kind allowance of the ICC

Possible Futures rides on a groundswell of popular interest in the culture of the postwar period in Japan; its furtive grasping at newly welcomed creative influences from abroad, its schizophrenic relationship with technology, and its regurgitation of the war experience in the technicolour media monster that became Japanese pop culture. Possible Futures covers much of the same territory when examining the influences of its featured artists, but the organisers have managed to skirt around otaku (pop-culture nerdism) almost entirely. I only counted one conventional robot in the show (Shuya Abe and Nam June Paik’s wimpy yet engaging Robot K-456, 1964-1974), and any Japanese of contemporary tastes would be pretty disappointed with this one.

The fully commercially realised otaku pop art that made the Murakami Takashi curated Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture flavour of the month at The Japan Society’s gallery in New York earlier this year has been eschewed. Instead, the show focuses heavily on what the ICC calls “experiments” – a word that suggests the artists may have been serving a higher cause throughout their wide and varied activities. And for those prone to searching for malevolent forces at work, when you look at the way postwar Japanese life has unfolded, it can sometimes seem as though an entire population has become the unwitting servant of technology, and certainly at the expense of some of it’s once revered traditions. But did these artists accelerate the movement toward this state, or did they simply record the transition?

One might view this as an exhibition about interactivity, with the user on one side of the interface, driving the technology on the other. (Here is a nice example of some user interactivity with a machine). It soon becomes apparent, however, that there is a schism in the different artists views as to whether the technology is actually exerting some controlling influence upon the user instead. Humans are tempted to see technology as a phenomenon that we are increasingly better able to control, but we need only look at our relationship with cars, which we continue to build despite their inherent tendency to ultimately lower our standard of living, to see that our control is tempered by many factors. Possible Futures ably illustrates how contemporary technology has the ability to aid and facilitate, or seduce and mold behavior. The Possible Futures catalog suggests that the thrall of “successfully connecting…never palls”, and glancing at the ICC’s visitors entrancement with the show’s interactive content seems to illustrate that technology has probably never been a one way street of exploitation. began to intertwine with the fruits of postwar technology.

Gadgeteer Kuwakubo Ryota’s fluid (2005) is not a new idea, at least for anyone who has dabbled in electronic music in the last 20 years or so. The artist has, however managed to reformat and perhaps distil the essence of live electronic jamming into a hand-held format. The fluid unit has an almost industrially well-finished feel to it, and the artists excellent website reveals an extensive history of slick yet commercially unlikely products (both hard and software). The mass-produced finish here serves to make the rudimentary percussive sound and sequencing tools easy to comprehend. So, one can bang on fluid , squelch the basic synthesiser, loop the noises and alter the tempo. The results would encourage most people out of a nightclub, but in a big white room all by oneself, even the rank amateur can momentarily experience the giddying glamor of bedroom producers the world over. Perhaps the most fun is the accompanying video of two gentleman (including Kuwakubo himself?) engaging in a very serious jam using only two Fluid units. They made better sounds than me.

Kuwakubo’s work touches on ideas of interface and performance. It’s a timely counterweight to today’s commuting masses stalking the urban environment clutching personal audio technology that serves to isolate and pacify, as opposed to the connectivity that recent times have promised. A hand-held electro radio jamming unit appears to have more in common with the internet forum-based media used to share ones music, video, photography and writing. Here the artist provides us with another dynamic electronic means by which to connect with fellow players.

Another very recent work takes this concept to the next stage by allowing the user to take the role of supreme creator as well. A slight exaggeration perhaps, but “PingMag favourite” Koichiro Eto’s Modulobe (2005), did make momentarily me feel like the brain of a snake. This supremely cool software allows the user, inside a simplified CAD application, to build a life form from a limited inventory of components (it’s a bit like Meccano). The user determines the number of joints and the flexibility of limbs or other appendages. You can also build and attach animated parts. Having saved the design, the user approaches an adjacent set of 3 plinths that stand before 3 video projections.

Each projection displays a simplified environment containing a creature designed in the CAD app, which is being controlled by a track ball. There is no goal as such, but by moving the ball you move your creation (or someone else’s) across the grid that serves as a landscape. You can bang the plinth, and the creature jumps into the air. Bigger creatures seemed to take more bangs to get airborne, and when in the air, they became unstable, sometimes returning to ground upside down, and unable to right themselves. The user is immediately struck by the superior designs of others that facilitate better stability, and is able to return to the studio to attempt to evolve his creation.

The best design encountered was a snake-like creature constructed with triangular modules. Controlling its frenzied progress through the barren landscape from the “core” or head module left one with an amazingly convincing impression of real-time animation. One could tie it in knots, only to see it slither out of them and on its’ way again. The design and controlling sections of the work are united by the usability of Eto’s brilliantly intuitive GUI. The combination of creator and user of such fantastical creatures is in its infancy here, but the results are alluring to even a sceptical gamer such as me. Will this feeling become commonplace, used for everything from navigation to tactical combat simulation? Are we observing the artist as cultural cartographer? Or as something more, as cultural navigator? Eto’s attempts to map our hidden data environment are fascinating to observe.

Similar questions are posed by some of the film video works on display. Toshio Matsumoto’s short films from the 70’s appear to be uninspired psychedelia, until one discovers that Matsumoto pioneered the use of medical and industrial imaging techniques in Japanese media art, in order to realise his vision. One is then struck by how his work documents the shift from analogue to digital post-production in the early 80’s, and ultimately serves to disseminate a counter cultural message (albeit a decade or so late). He may have been living a flashback, but he was true to his vision. His later works look eerily like Macintosh screen savers from a couple of years ago, but predate them by more than twenty years.

Other pioneers were CTG or Computer Technique Group, whose members worked across a wide spectrum of media in their experimentation. Their strangely beautiful graphic work - imbued with a kind of LED glow - serves to highlight the dearth of aesthetic progress in graphic design today, as they still look fresh almost 40 years later. It is testimony to these early experiments in digital imaging that they struggle to compete with the more interactive content on display. A typical Japanese visitor has been raised on a media aesthetic the roots of which are on display here for all to see, but some will walk by without making the connection.

Other noteworthy early works reveal the results of an emerging economic and technological power that began to have the means to supply its’ young artists with the tools of the new media. There is a tension apparent in the creative output of the Experimental Workshop collective. The aesthetics of their early 50’s output is rooted in pre-war European modernism, but their approach in film, animation, performance and sound suggests a DIY absorption of new media forms and approaches that must have been ground breaking. In retrospect, it looks like even the influx of new foreign art influences was outstripped by the pace of technological advances at home.

Takahiko Iimura’s strange films a decade later still contain dada moments, but are kind of prophetic in their depiction of bored youth trying to eke a creative niche out of a sprawling suburban environment. By the time Hakudo Kobayashi arrived on the scene in the mid 70’s, Japanese media art seems to have adopted a much more assured position. Hakudo’s films of garbage men on their rounds and discussions with random housewives on the street look like social investigation, and it looked like the new forms and their practitioners, after all the experimentation, had begun to find direction. Hakudo’s long distance fraternity with American artist Bill Viola revolved around the communicative and even spiritually enlightening (!) power of television, but more importantly indicated an equality of vision that two video art pioneers shared from afar.

Possible Futures’ kinetic artworks provided both some of the strongest and weakest moments, presumably included on the basis that they were able to be conceived thanks to technological developments in small scale motors etc. Toshio Iwai’s work Time Stratum II (1985) was mysterious, mesmerizing, and the bleeptronica soundtrack left you nodding. And Minoru Yoshida’s unmissable Bisexual Flower (1970) was strikingly odd; without further research I can really only compare it with something I think I saw at a rave I went to on the outskirts of Sydney in 1994. Yet Keijiro Satoh’s assorted kinetic works were annoyingly reminiscent of Memphis furniture, and seem entirely dependent on their visual aesthetic in lieu of any real conceptual approach. There is nothing wrong with his works as such (although they look like corporate desk toys to some), but their inclusion in an otherwise ambitious exhibition does seem at odds with the artists who were advancing the dialogue on communication and human interaction.

Perhaps the most engaging work in Possible Futures is Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa’s large scale installation: gravicells (2004). Maybe that’s because the work is you, transformed into pure data, graphically plotted in real time and used to generate an immersive environment in which you move about. Veteran media artist Mikami, and architect Ichikawa have built a feedback loop designed to bring us to a more intimate understanding of gravity as a sixth sense of the body.

It’s an amazing system, where in a darkened room a large tiled square section of floor has a perfect set of parallel lines projected upon it. Another projection on the wall depicts the floor space as a grid. When one steps upon the tiles, the amount of pressure and location of contact are articulated as a kind of splash (in the corresponding position) on the floor data (the splash occurs around you), but even more absorbingly, as a bloating of the rotating 3-D data grid wall projection. It’s cool as well as thought provoking, spooky yet clever. It’s nice to be in there with a couple of strangers, with everyone figuring out how it works, but a little shy about making too big an example of themselves.

Along with many pieces in the show, it seems to speak volumes about an ongoing relationship between art and technology. It’s as though when we can see ourselves mirrored in data, and chart our influence on the world in this way, technology has proven itself more than a handy tool, but as something more essential. Technology has become a medium of self-reflection, a creature of our making that has had plenty of Frankenstein moments, but which may be ready to prove that our kind deserves the opportunity to replicate itself in its machines.

This was a small sample of the permutations of post war art and technology chronicled by Possible Futures. The show runs at ICC in Shinjuku until the 25th of December; spend an afternoon with some techno-iconoclasts and support a great media art venue.

8 Comments

1. Of course there was some kind of police officer to guard the whole spot (not entirely sure why, actually

   Posted by: konteyner on December 24th, 2010 at 8:13 am

2. started to open bottles of champagnes with award winning film makers Traktor as very special guest at the venue

   Posted by: perdeci on December 25th, 2010 at 6:57 am

3. maurers

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