Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock vs. Brad Pitt at Sunset

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tonight 8/5/2022: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock vs. Brad Pitt at sunset (approximately 8:36 PM) at All Star Fine and Recorded Arts: 3022 E 35th St, Minneapolis, MN 55406 Instagram. Listen to the audio here. Live Zoom link click here Meeting ID: 867 4296 5027. View a book version of the film here.

All Star Fine and Recorded Arts is not scared to go up against the big guns. So, we are proud to announce that Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock’s film, Mistaken Landscapes, shot from Shinkansen Bullet trains in Japan over six years, will drop on August 5th, the same release date as Bullet Train, a new action comedy starring Brad Pitt.

Based on the 2010 Japanese novel Maria Beetle by Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train (filmic value yet unknown) is not to be confused with the extraordinary 1975 thriller, The Bullet Train, starring the legendary Ken Takakura and Sonny Chiba. Regardless—Takakura, Chiba, Pitt—we stand our ground.

Like the big motion picture companies, we, too, will bring a sampling of Japanese landscape into American theaters; however, our version emerges from the heartland minus the comedy, less predictably and more abstractly. Mistaken Landscapes will be projected onto the gallery window from inside All Star Fine and Recorded Arts, inverting space and turning the interior of this Minneapolis gallery into a view of the passing Japanese terrain. The corner location and visibility from pedestrians and drivers ideally places All Star Fine and Recorded Arts as the conduit between travelers on different continents.

About the film: the images comprising Mistaken Landscapes were made with an iPhone while traveling on Shinkansen bullet trains in Japan between 2014 and 2020 and exploit the iPhone’s High Dynamic Range capabilities.

High Dynamic Range, or HDR, has been an iPhone option since model four came out in 2010. When HDR is enabled, the camera quickly takes three images each time you press the shutter button—one underexposed, one at the correct exposure, and one overexposed. The three different exposures are combined, yielding a single image with an increased dynamic range of color and contrast.

Even though the three HDR exposures are made almost instantaneously, the Shinkansen travels at speeds up to 300 km/h (186 mph); consequently, the view out the window shifts during the image-making process. The brief lag between exposures causes inaccurate imagery alignment, with misregistration areas appearing featureless, and gray.

As viewed from a speeding Shinkansen, the world streaking by already appears unreal; however, the slippage generated by the HDR shift pushes the images into territory bordering on hallucinatory. This selection, pulled from 11,417 images, manifests a range of scenes from urban to rural and a spectrum of misregistration from subtle to severe.

Forming a counterpoint to the rhythmic shifting of the distorted visuals, the audio of this film is constructed from recordings made while sitting still on the balcony of a Tokyo apartment. As with the HDR images that don’t precisely combine, the addition of sounds—a child’s tantrum in the courtyard, a neighbor’s koto lesson, rice cooking, and an answering machine message from FedEx—enhances the surreal qualities of the film and foregrounds the contrast between movement and stasis, outside and inside, travel and home.

The star actor in this film is the visual/aural landscape itself.

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.

12.9 miles, 24 minutes; 25.2 miles, 42 minutes; 18.8 miles, 54 minutes; 11.4 miles, 40 minutes

12.9 miles, 24 minutes; 25.2 miles, 42 minutes; 18.8 miles, 54 minutes; 11.4 miles, 40 minutes, 2009, video, color, silent, total running time 3 minutes and 5 seconds. Book: 2009, bound 162 page hardcover book, h 8" x w 10"

12.9 miles, 24 minutes; 25.2 miles, 42 minutes; 18.8 miles, 54 minutes; 11.4 miles, 40 minutes is a 3 minute and 5 second video comprised of one hundred sixty photographs taken consecutively on Friday, February 20, 2009. The images were shot from a fixed position in the back of a car with a digital camera on full automatic mode. All images were made at one-second intervals by means of a timer and the images are displayed in the order in which they were shot with no editing, or retouching. The information at the beginning of the video denotes the distances and times between three different IKEA locations and the information at the conclusion of the video refers to the exact times at which the three IKEA images were made. The book version of this project was conceptualized, executed, and bound within the same day. This project is a collaboration with Anibal J. Pella-Woo.

An Anchor

An Anchor, 2000, 16 drawings, ink & white-out on paper, hardbound book with newspaper cover, h 8.5 x w 5.5

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. – Vladimir Nabokov

At some point in 2000 I accidentally came across a copy of The New York Times dated Wednesday, April 21, 1999 that lodged itself in my memory for months to come. This particular copy of the Times was remarkable for the reason that it contained an article about a man named Terrance Johnson, a reporter with a camera hidden in his eyeglasses. Although a licensed social worker, he took a low paying job at a mental hospital in order to expose rampant patient mistreatment. I felt that Terrance’s humanitarian actions needed to be observed; nevertheless, I must admit that my interest in Terrance was not entirely benign. Being an image-maker myself, I felt an intense envy of his omnivorous recording.

It seems that Terrance was also aware of the awesome power that his camera eyeglasses endowed him with – just look at his expression, or more accurately, his lack of expression. I find the quirky blankness of his stare compelling because it subtly hints at a confidence imparted by the righteousness of his cause, and perhaps more significantly, by the fact that nothing can elude his observations. The fixity of his stare, as well as his emptiness, became a fascination for me.

It stood to reason that a method mirroring the intensity of Terrance’s techniques would be an appropriate starting point for an experiment. I might begin to get at something beyond the surface of the cryptic, half–toned image by staring intensely at the newspaper clipping for approximately one minute, then recreating the image from recollection. This extended method would allow a complex portrait to emerge that would both describe my subject and honor him through repetition. This would be my tribute to Terrance the undercover reporter.

The framework of serial repetition seemed simple enough; however, in short order comprehensiveness and verisimilitude gave way to an interest in scrutinizing emerging peculiarities and following their tangents. The focus became less about accumulating details into a whole than a decoding of a preexisting and surprisingly complete portrait. By increasingly relying on my recollections rather than my one-minute of actual observation, the image unlocked and allowed something unfamiliar, yet compelling to emerge.

16 drawings later I still don’t know any more about Terrance Johnson the reporter with a camera hidden in his eyeglasses, but I am very familiar with the way that his right lapel almost touches the edge of the frame, the similarity of the inverted angle of the bridge of his glasses and the open collar of his shirt, as well as the way that his eyes seem to be looking at two slightly different points. Lastly, and inexplicably, an anchor began to feature prominently in the drawings.