Hide Andrew, Save Yourself!!! |
The Japan Media Arts Festival (JMAF) is competitive, international and centred on the exhibition of Award Winning Works held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. The spatial design of the exhibition is based on origami, the concept that the unexpected can be made from a common sheet of paper. Entry plaques to the exhibition state that the aim of the festival is to promote the popularity of media arts and describe the growing cultural currency of Japanese media art, games, animation and manga as ‘Japan Cool.’ The festival is definitely achieving its aim of popularising media art with audiences growing from 2,000 to 68,000 in the 10 years since it began.
The exhibition comprises three floors of screened, documented and installed work grouped in the submission categories Art, Entertainment, Animation and Manga. The festival includes Symposia, the 12th Computer Graphics Contest for Students, the Leading Edge Technology Showcase and a Manga Library. The week-long screening program is made up of long and short animation and Manga sessions, documentaries on the festival’s award winners and compilations from international festivals—SIGGRAPH, Seoul International Computer Animation Festival (SICAF), Ars Electronica and Australia’s Electrofringe.
plaplax, hanahana |
plaplax, hanahana |
Works in the Art Division, which includes the fluid categories of Installation, Interactive Art, Visual Image, Still Image and Web Works largely lacked emotional content, focusing instead on the mechanical actions of viewers and often with geometrically abstract visual manifestations. A trend appears to favour translating scientific phenomenon over commentary on human relations. The influence of artificial intelligence research is evident with many artists exploring notions of the individual and the group, the part and the whole.
Johanna Reich, front |
The use of technology by Japanese artists is noticeably rigorous—the best, the latest, the simplest and the most aesthetically pleasing—but many of the interactive forms are by nature rational, employing familiar domestic devices. In contrast, Jonathan den Breejen and Marenka Deenstra’s PingPongPixel ([Netherlands] represented by a video documentary) is completely irrational. It creates an image made of ping-pong balls from any digital image loaded by the viewer. Software analyses and converts the image into black and white pixels. The data of each pixel (colour and position) is represented by an individual ping-pong ball. The software then activates a ping-pong ball feeder (that looks like a huge backyard experiment made of tubes and buckets) and loads the balls into a perspex frame to create a large scale ping-pong pixel image. It appears to take a day for the ping pong balls to load and this grossly delayed satisfaction combined with the sloppy, clunky mechanics of the ball feeder, seems to make a comment about the ‘advance’ of technology. It’s bizarre and hilarious.
Without a strong media dramaturgy that rigorously connects content with forms of interaction and the behavioural psychology of the viewer, interactive art can easily be reduced to mere game play and novelty. Sosu Hockey by Takano Jiro is a prime (bad joke) example of this—a tabletop game in which the player aims to collect as many prime numbers as they can whilst repelling the rest. Why is it in the Art Division? Who can say?
The two works most innovative in form are hanahana by plaplax and Save Yourself!!! (see opening paragraph) by Hide Andrew. hanahana is an interactive scent project where animations of flowers and butterflies, bees, cats, dogs and noses are triggered by an aromatic sensor when viewers squirt aromas on paper leaves.
The beauty of some immersive interactive works is in allowing the viewer to create their own experience or even narrative. Tablescape Plus by Y Kakehi, T Naemura and M Matsushita does this, if nothing else. A white box with a tabletop screen is set with white pieces on which little projections evoke a park scene. There are people, trees, a bench and the sounds of birds, crickets, crows, and trees moving in the breeze. The pieces are movable and the images animate according to the direction, location and quality of movement. The park people turn their backs if moved away, and break into a trot if moved fast.
I create an average day at the park. When I accidentally bump the edges of two park people they bow and greet each other in a high pitched conversation that only stops when they separate. A balding man in an ill-fitting suit and sporting a large moustache bumps into a bench and is immediatly seated on it. I fetch a friend for him to chat with but she chooses to stand behind him. I coax her to sit. She eventually concedes as long as the distance of a scaled meter is maintained. Only silence here—no chatting—and only two at a time on the bench, please. Meanwhile I take a tall blond man as far as a copse where he frightens a flock of birds that erupt across the park. He loiters there for a minute to see if the moustached man will join him. He does, frightening another flock of birds. A lady approaches but turns away when it looks like the blond man is going to pee in the bushes. When I shift a piece quickly the characters get snappy and a heated exchange ensues. It takes a little while for them to settle down and apologise but eventually I leave them bowing eternally to each other.
Japan Media Arts Festival (JMAF), Feb 24-March 2007http://plaza.bunka.go.jp
Cat Jones is a Sydney-based performer, multimedia creatrix and co-director of Electrofringe. Her attendance at JMAF was assisted by the Australia Council Visual Arts Board.
RealTime issue #78 April-May 2007 pg. 12
© Cat Jones; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]