From September 7, 2011, YUKA Contemporary has been incorporated and renamed as “YUKA TSURUNO”. The “Lumen・Sonus・Memoria (Light/Sound/Memory)” exhibit, the gallery’s second show under its new name, focuses on “video” and “sound (resonance)”, and will be held from November 12 (Sat).
Remarkable developments in technology have changed our lifestyle dramatically. This has not only impacted the field of visual arts, but also video production, transmission, and projection. Through realistic 3-D videos, high-capacity video distribution systems, and the Internet, we can now simulate and experience various events from around the world while in front of our computers.
Today, speech synthesis software can reproduce the voices of historical futures, and text conversion software can distribute “text as voice.” Not too long ago, such ideas were confined to the pages of sci-fi novels, but have now become a reality.
However, exposure to massive amounts of videos and sounds (voice/music) has not honed our vision and hearing, but instead seems to have dulled them. Rather than sifting through data for necessary information and restructuring it to etch it into one’s memory, we seem to have abandoned this process to “saving just in case” onto computers and storage devices.
The sibling art unit, SHIMURA BROS., attracted interest through their work, “X-RAY TRAIN”, shown at the former Sakuragi station of the Tokyu Toyoko line. This piece was a CT scanned version of the Lumière brothers’ steam locomotive train film, which is said to be the origin of film.
mamoru worked with the SHIMURA BROS. on their installation piece “HIBERNATION.” This enormous, 9-meter-high installation was presented at the Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse’s “ART RINK”, and mamoru was in charge of the acoustics. After winning the highest award at the “EXPERIMENTAL SOUND, ART, AND PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL 2010”, mamoru presented a solo show at YUKA TSURUNO, and recently performed the “etude no. 39 Instant Noodle” at ART TAIPEI.
Kentaro of SHIMURA BROS. and mamoru have formed a special unit, OVAR (Origin of Visual Audio Research), to present experimental new pieces for this exhibition. Reverse playback, changes in camerawork, and changes in the number of sound tracks will all be experimented with as research into the basic structure of audiovisual work that produces stories through creation of time-based dynamics through the combination of image and sound. They will attempt to visualize a multi-dimensional perception of time that is not based on the traditional unidirectional timeline of “past-present-future.”
In addition, Nobuhiro Shimura, who has continued to display videos in diverse locations outside of the “white cube”, will also display his work. His past works include “Akasaka Art Flower 08” (a video piece that used numerous dress pins pinned onto a tatami mat of a Japanese-style restaurant as its screen), the “Aichi Triennale 2010”, and “Koganecho Bazaar2009/ 2010/2011” (projections onto canopies and roads). For this exhibition, Shimura will project two works, “Goldfish” and “Pool”, onto the Kanda River, which runs next to the gallery.* Environmental changes (such as the weather, the light of the sinking sun, and the never ceasing water’s movement) will create a world where every moment is a new and different encounter with the artist’s work.
Through their works, OVAR and Shimura are challenging our ability to accumulate experiences through conscious reconstruction of external stimuli in this age of information overload which has numbed our perception of images and sounds.
This exhibition was given the Latin title “Lumen,” “Sonus,” and “Memoria” because “light”, “sound”, and “memory” are important themes unifying the pieces. This show is intended to delve to the root and core of these. Also, it is meaningful that “lumens” is the unit used to indicate a projector’s brightness.
