Showing posts with label walking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label walking. Show all posts

Case Study Tokyo 2020



Case Study Tokyo 2020
7×7 in, 18×18 cm
438 Pages
Publish Date May 01, 2020
Preview the entirety of the book here.

Take one part working methodology from the influential 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, combine with the megacity of Tokyo, add Fordham University Gabelli students, stir for ten days in Japan and what do you get? You get direct acquisition of knowledge through experience with a small team, realized in a hardback research volume focusing on branding, sensory marketing, architecture, design, photography, and urban planning.

There is a fiendish pleasure in meeting your students at Tokyo's Narita airport after they have endured a fourteen-hour flight and crossed the International Date Line. Their disorientation is palpable—from bloodshot eyes to messy hair (which actually fits in quite nicely with the local, youthful styles) and from the need for sudden naps and its alternate in the form of sleep-deprived rambling. It is the equivalent of barging into someone's room at 3:00 a.m. and saying, "Wake up, the class has started!"

Nonetheless, over ten days, endless miles of walking unfamiliar terrain, including innumerable fresh sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and experiences, a transformation occurs. The initial shock and strangeness of being in a new country yields to impressions that are increasingly nuanced and personal. Here follows a description of the primary objectives and methodologies employed in this class, which will contextualize the storm of thousands of images that is to come on the following pages.

Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour is a landmark study that looked at a city in terms of architecture, density, lighting, signage, sound, and numerous additional prisms. It is an eclectic research tome whose structure served as the skeleton for our case study of Tokyo. While we are not architects, nor did we travel to Las Vegas, we were interested in the idea of looking at a city from multiple vantage points, both literal and conceptual. The eclecticism of our approach has led us to unforeseen revelations and to find engaging connections across different aspects of our topic city, Tokyo.

The megacity of Tokyo (population over 13.9 million) served as the base for our investigations, with research itineraries that brought us from the cosmopolitan ward of Shinjuku to the center of youth culture in Shibuya, from the cutting edge fashion districts of Harajuku to the traditional temples and shrines of Asakusa. Each day brought new and different locations where we quantified aspects of the city for our study. Our team conducted primary visual research via smartphones with an emphasis placed on generating straightforward images that were decidedly not photographic works of art. These images were subsequently categorized into our working data set and eventually output to this book.

For the ten days that comprised our study, each of the students in our team produced five images per day in each of the following categories: sign, object, area, color, and architecture. Images were organized by date, as well as assigned one of the five keywords. In assigning only single, descriptive keywords to each image, several intriguing dilemmas arose almost immediately. How does one appropriately label, for instance, an image of a crumpled, colorful gum wrapper covered with graphics and brand logos, or architect Tadao Ando and fashion designer Issey Miyake's 21_21 Design Site in the Roppongi district? With the former, the wrapper could easily fit into the category for either object, color, or sign. With the latter example, the roof of Ando's building, based on Miyake's clothing concept, "A Piece of Cloth," is folded from one sheet of steel and functions as both an enormous sign and advertisement for Miyake's concepts. Beyond the branding of Issey Miyake, the building's single sheet of folded steel potentially references the sheet of folded paper used in origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. It thus functions as an advertisement for a traditional aspect of Japanese culture. The complexities of categorization are numerous.

During generating thousands of images and assigning keywords, class members began to ask questions. Need signage be large, or be linguistically based? Might a building's silhouette serve as signage? At what point does an object's scale shift into being an architectural structure, or diffuse sufficiently and transform into an area? Is there a color palette specific to Tokyo and fundamentally different from elsewhere? How do companies negotiate co-branded endeavors in regards to color, object relationship, and shelf placement hierarchy? Even with their inherent absurdities, the five basic categories we employed provided a method by which to consider Tokyo, prioritize the defining characteristics of the images produced, and organize our research.

At the very beginning of this course, the class viewed French filmmaker Chris Marker's 1983 essay film on travel and Japan, Sans Soleil. Oddly, here at the end of our process, a quote from the film's narrator resonates strongly and states our Case Study Tokyo's objectives perfectly. She says, "I've been around the world several times, and now only banality still interests me. On this trip, I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter." Along with architect Tadao Ando's description of 21_21 Design Site as a "venue to redirect our eyes to everyday things and events," we can see how this study is a collection of small, but precise examinations by a group "relentlessly" traversing Tokyo. The primary goal was simply to see.

What one makes of their observations, detects in the trends within the book, or how one might utilize this data in the future is yet one more very interesting and wonderfully complicated discussion.

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, 2020

彦島 Hikoshima



















 


彦島 Hikoshima
Size 5×8 in, 13×20 cm
88 Pages
ISBN: softcover: 9780368099113
Publish Date Jan 04, 2019
Preview the entirety of the book here.

The images in this book are selected from a body of work made in the south of Japan over the past ten years. I first started photographing on the small island of Hikoshima in the city of Shimonoseki during visits to see my wife’s family. I wanted to walk where she had walked, gradually discovering a sense of place through observation. After my son was born I continued my walks; however, with him strapped to my chest, my camera in one hand, and a baby bottle in the other. My son and I now walk the island together and he often points out things to me that he thinks would make interesting images, in addition to making his own images with a point-and-shoot camera. It is enormous fun, as well as a means for him to connect to the place in which he was born.

Dah Di-dah-dah Dah-dah-dah, Di-dah-di-dit Dah-dah-dah Di-di-di-dah Dit Di-dah-dit Di-di-dit


Dah Di-dah-dah Dah-dah-dah, Di-dah-di-dit Dah-dah-dah Di-di-di-dah Dit Di-dah-dit Di-di-dit, 1985 (approx.) – 2011, h 20 cm x w 13 cm (h 8” x w 5”), 82 page pocket book, black and white text pages printed on 60-pound (90g/m2) cream-colored paper, 4-color front and back cover. Project for Markers 8, International Artists’ Museum Artura/Projective, ArtLife for the World Contemporary Art Space, Venice, Italy.

Translate the long and short signals of Morse code contained in this pocket book into English and you will have detailed walking directions generated by Google Maps from the Venice, Italy gallery in which you are standing to a specific location.

The Google Maps algorithm will bring you on some rather mysterious and seemingly pointless detours along the way, including two segments of the journey by ship; nevertheless, the instructions will eventually get you from point A to point B. Follow this walking route for approximately three days and eleven hours – 2,180 km – and you will arrive at a corner where two lovers used to meet in a black and white film from 1962.

On top of a pedestrian handrail at the intersection you will find a yellow key for a small locker in the Ueno train station in Tokyo, Japan. When you try to use this key to open locker number 6107 it will no longer work because by now the three hundred Yen locker fee has long since ran out, the contents have been taken to the lost and found, and the lock has been changed. So, present the key to the station’s lost and found department and they will hand you a Maxell UR 90 Tinted Oval Window Cassette Shell / POSITION•NORMAL / JAPAN•JAPON cassette.

There are no labels or distinguishing features on the cassette itself. Nor is there any label, or information on the cassette case, save for the fact that the cassette case spine is completely blacked out with marker pen. This is your prize. It is the most valuable thing that I can give to you. You hold my future in your hands.

This cassette tape was fabricated in Japan sometime during the mid-80s, exported to the United States, and purchased in the New York region. The tape was subsequently used to record a conversation between a family member and a psychic. It was, amongst other things, about the possible directions that my life would take. However, after the family member’s death in 2005, and prior to having the opportunity to listen to the tape, the cassette was erased.

In 2009 the erased cassette was brought back to Japan from the United States and presented to a diminutive Japanese psychic who can consistently be found at the corner of Kuyakusho Dōri and Yasukuni Dōri in Shinjuku, Tokyo. After a careful investigation of the tape, the Japanese psychic stated that since the erased recording was originally in English, a language that she didn’t understand, she was not able to decipher it, whereas had the erased recording been in Japanese she would have been able to.

After an improvised ceremony, I quietly placed the cassette in locker 6107, locked it, and walked away with the locker's yellow key. The Maxell UR 90 Tinted Oval Window Cassette Shell / POSITION•NORMAL / JAPAN•JAPON cassette sat in the darkness of the locker until my three hundred Yen ran out and a station attendant took the locker’s solitary object to the lost and found. It now waits for you there, our futures interlocked as the erased tape predicted.

Landscape Film (Tottori, Japan)


Landscape Film (Tottori, Japan), 2009, video, color, sound, total running time 1 minute and 52 seconds.

Landscape Film is partially constructed from material extracted from Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film Woman in the Dunes. The scenes utilized from Teshigahara’s film have been sequenced so that they show the protagonist walking through an empty landscape, then suddenly, without reason, breaking into a sprint and running out of the film. The screen in Landscape Film is divided between Teshigahara’s B&W footage and color footage shot in April 2009 in Tottori, Japan where Teshigahara made his film 45 years earlier.

I walked and filmed 199 steps in the Tottori sand dunes corresponding to each of the main character’s paces from the film. Once brought together side by side with Teshigahara’s footage, each of my steps was meticulously slowed down, or sped up to match the shifting gait of the central character.

The soundtrack is comprised of live sounds recorded during my walk and portions of the film’s ominous score. The synchronized footsteps on sand and powerful wind overloading the microphone function as additional sound effects duplicating the protagonist’s movements and environment.

The left channel's figure moving on screen serves as a document of a dubbing process, a point of view shot from Teshigahara’s actor, or potentially even someone pursuing the main character. Beyond the precise matching of the footsteps, the relationship between the footage, like the principal's behavior, is left ambiguous.

Tracking


Tracking, 2005, film, black and white, silent, total running time 18 seconds (left film) and 11 seconds (right film), presented as two nonsynchronous DVDs, looped

Two black and white Super-8 films are presented side by side in Tracking, the left film looking down, the right film looking up. The footage was shot on two consecutive passes while walking a long hallway in a Medical Examiners office. The films are slightly different in both length and speed, consequently allowing the top and bottom portion of the human body to fall in and out of step with one another. The title Tracking potentially refers to the process of following someone’s trail and/or the leaking of current between two insulated points.

The Plot is Very Bare


The Plot is Very Bare, 2005, 50 LightJet prints mounted to Sintra and Plexiglas, h 4.875” x w 6.5”

The Plot is Very Bare represents an uncomplicated walk across a baseball field to the bench in the dugout. Each photograph is taken from a position one step closer than the previous and the photographs are installed exactly one pace apart from one another. Additionally, this is the Encino Little League field in Encino, CA where the character Stacy from the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High loses her virginity to Ron Johnson the lecherous audio consultant from the mall.

Falling Between Positions



Falling Between Positions, 2002, stereoscopic 3-d video projection, color, silent, total running time 7 seconds, looped

In Falling Between Positions, the seemingly simple action of walking is broken down into a series of small, planned increments for examination. Three paces were executed over the period of one hour. Each pace was broken down into 25 stages of body movement, where each of the 25 phases making up a single pace had to be held for 60 seconds. In the final stereoscopic 3D projection, the three paces are sped up approximately 4000% so that they appear at normal speed. This project is a collaboration with Brian McClave.

The Swimmer




The Swimmer, 2001, video, color, sound, total running time 24 minutes and 37 seconds (three stills from film comprised of 401 images)

The Swimmer is a layering of inaccessible performance, automatically formatted video, and exceptionally thorough documentation. Ten Hours from now I will begin a seventy-five mile, three day, walking expedition from my apartment in Brooklyn to upstate New York to participate in an event called the Brewster Project. This will be my very own hallucinatory trip upriver into the heart of darkness, during which I will be continually broadcasting to the world – at maximum volume from speakers attached to my body – the entirety of Martin Sheen's hypnotic interior monologue extracted from Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. Digital images will be produced systematically throughout the trip. Then, upon completion of the journey, these stills will be coupled with Sheen’s monologue to serve as a new and unexpected accompaniment for a well-worn audio track.

The piece is called The Swimmer, in honor of Burt Lancaster's itinerant character in the 1968 film of the same title. The Swimmer is one of the most effectively appalling of all quest films, perhaps even more so than Apocalypse Now, because its calamities are sited in an innocuous suburban landscape during the height of the Vietnam War.

The Swimmer



The Swimmer, 2001, c-print mounted to Sintra and Plexiglas, h 48.403” x w 36.4” (bottom image: film still of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz from Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now)