art department - forbidden colour

ART DEPARTMENT
Early on in J@pan Inc’s relatively short history, I suggested that
an occasional half page be devoted to ways in which technology
has been used creatively in this country. I was thinking of works
by artists like Toshio Iwai (February 2001), Mitsuo Yamaguchi
(November 2000), or even font designer Takafumi Miyajima,
who’s never made it into Art Department but whose fonts I used
for the Konbini issue (March 2000) and the first Bit Valley issue
(May 2000).
What I wasn’t asking for was a regular page. But that’s what I got.
And it means that I’ve broadened my own knowledge of Japan’s
digital art scene as well as introduced people that I already knew
of and whose work I admired. Some artists’ work I just reviewed;
to some I asked questions by email. In between, I got to meet
some of the artists whose work was among that which attracted
me to Japan in the first place. People like Tadanori Yokoo, Tatsuo
Miyajima, and Atau Tanaka.
Digital art is a wide world. Japan is just a part of it. But, occasionally, something particularly Japanese appears. Since Japan’s arts are
something that brought me pretty far from London, I’ve never been
able to fathom the idea held in some quarters that Japan is not a
very creative countr y. (In fact, I didn’t know such an opinion existed until talking with people here.) So if anybody still holds to that
belief, hopefully these pages will change their minds.
— Andrew Pothecary
A RT D E PA RT M E N T: JULY 20 00
IT WAS ANDY WARHOL (who else?) who said something along the lines of: the business deal is one of the greatest art forms. And he certainly wasn’t the first to exploit the connection between business and art. Sometimes
the art almost is the business: think also of Damien Hirst knowingly painting what art buyers want to pay for, or,
perhaps, Jeff Koons taking a postcard of, say, dogs and hiring someone to sculpt an exact replica of them. It can
never be said that artists don’t know a thing or two about business.
Anyone reading this magazine will have realized that konbini are big business in Japan. We dedicated an
entire issue to convenience store e-commerce. No surprise then that a Japanese artist – Masato Nakamura – has
already taken the connection literally. Or is the relationship more complicated than that?
The attitude of his konbini and McDonald’s work is not simply that of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soups. (Despite
the centuries of art sponsorship before and the decade or more since, Warhol is still a touchstone for such art.)
Walk among Nakamura’s circle of linked McDonald’s arches and the feeling is of – what? Is it left up to you
entirely or does the artist have a prepared intention? Enter a darkened gallery room illuminated only by four
neon-backed acrylic convenience store signs – no
names, however, only
the color-combination
and layout tells you
who’s who – and the
feeling is of a knowing
participation. But is it
just the “art” conscious
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who are laughing? After
all, 7-Eleven, Lawson,
Family Mart, AM-PM,
and McDonald’s all obviously recognize the
impact of propagating
their colors through art:
they all sponsor the
show.
This despite the fact
that the exhibition earlier this year at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art featured a selection of turn-ofthe-millennium artists-with-attitude and was called “Land/Mind/Body Scapes in the Age of Cold Burn” (hardly
the warm family feeling that the convenience stores may be wanting). And despite the fact that Nakamura is
featured alongside photographs of suicide locations from the suicide’s final point of view, Takashi Honma’s
nightmarishly bland Tokyo Suburbia, and fat bodies suspended above their own incontinent mess.
Andy Warhol also took brands and made them household names beyond their function, and he’s never been
alone in appropriating them. But Campbell’s never sponsored him. Perhaps the stores are wise to another
Warhol homily: don’t pay attention to what they say, just measure the publicity in column inches. Or in this
case, in gallery wall space.
Art is rarely “pure,” business rarely simple, advertising rarely measurable. Where you see the separation or
conjunction – and the final comment – is partly left to you. Who said cynical? And about whom? Personally, I
thought it was hilarious. – Andrew Pothecary
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A RT D E PA RT M E N T : AU G U S T 2000
Sensory Overload
Digital art is becoming ubiquitous – and predictable. As with any genre, so much of it follows
a recognizable routine (3-D girls, glossy rendered
surfaces, stock surrealism created with transparency and layering, otaku imaginings …).
Digital Image Gallery 2000, an annual exhibit
featuring 160-plus artists, indulges this ubiquitousness – and makes room for the genre’s more exceptional works. It also allows gallery presentation
itself to become an element in works usually seen
only on the printed or online page. (The exhibition
is just one of Digital Image’s activities. Set up a
decade ago, the Japanese organization offers members promotion, introductions to interested compa nies, training opportunities, and so on.) The
Gallery 2000 show is split into two Tokyo happenings: the first took place earlier this year, the second is happening this month in Omotesando.
Among the earlier exhibitors were, for example,: Koji Matsubara (www1.nisiq.net/~plateaux),
who exhibited a careful, complex abstract (large at
100 cm square) with routed lines disguising/revealing nodal Japanese letters and kanji (see left). The
work is made using only Illustrator. It could be
just carefully painted, but the technology for paths,
layers, and repetition feeds the concept.
Yukio Kuwajima’s pictures (www.bitmap.co.jp/
kuwajima) have an edge to their content that pulls
them out of the familiar computer art (one features
a crying, bandaged baby among puri kura – the
“print club” photo stickers still popular in young
Japan). They were exhibited printed on sheets of
large art-pad paper that you could leaf through in
the gallery. His youth-inspired theme and style –
that vacant-yet-edgy culture of contemporary
Tokyo (see upper right) – quite obviously border on
those of the “Super Flat” artists, a recent grouping
curated into existence by contemporary-art success
Takahashi Murakami. Indeed, it seems the words
pop and otaku, which were key in that show, are
paramount in computer art.
Both Kuwajima and Matsubara use the newer
technology grounded in established illustrative
modes (after all, technology without the concept or
feeling is, well, just technology).
But technology taking its own direction can be
interesting in itself. Mitsuhiko Kotani took the
now familiar android of computer graphics and
worked it into abstraction (right). In this and his
other work (www.kcr21.co.jp), he brings to a wellused computer graphic imagery a style and appearance that is out of the ordinary.
Dip into the overload: you’ll be rewarded with
contemporary successes and future directions.
– Andrew Pothecary
Digital Gallery 2000 (www.digitalimage.org), August
17-24, Gallery Nespace, Omotesando.
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A RT DEPA RT M E N T: SE PTEMBER 20 00
Digital/Physical
Who says that online or computer-based art
napalmed (one of the most visceral, physical photos ever), he turned the
has no physical presence? Artist Atau Tanaka
scan’s digital data into music, adding to his interpretation by “hacking” the
gives lie to that idea through the various digidata to alter the composition and harmonic arrangement.
tal/physical works he’s created over the past
Also in the past year, Tanaka exhibited in galleries in Europe
year. In his “Global String” installation, gallery
“Constellations,” a piece involving work on five iMacs. Onscreen, planvisitors in two different parts of the world create
ets float in imaginary space, and as visitors navigate and manipulate
music by strumming a large, tensed string (above). Its
them they cause MP3 audio associated with each planet to stream
vibrations are then interpreted and transmitted instantinto the gallery space. The sound contributions, from different comly via the Net to the other gallery, merging the physical
posers, are drawn from servers all over the Web. Five gallery visiand online worlds.
tors playing with the iMacs can make music together with the
In his work as part of the music group Sensorband, Atau
sound from imaginary space ending up in real space, where it’s
himself is body-wired to a computer while the two other
blended with ambient gallery noise or even nearby café noise
musicians either manipulate self-made “spatial control instrufiltering through to the gallery.
ments” or create sounds by disrupting the space of an encomAs for the “Global String” project, it doesn’t yet look
passing movement-sensitive cage.
like it will be supported in Japan. However, thanks to a
While Sensorband’s recent release (Area/Puls) follows the
grant from the Daniel Langlois (founder of Softimage)
experimental music scene’s attraction to sine waves and purity, in
Foundation, it should open in Rotterdam’s V2 and
his solo music efforts Atau’s kept the body theme beating strong. His
Linz’s Ars Electronica galleries in November.
Biorhythms CD opens with sampled heart beat and continues via the
Which doesn’t bother Atau: as a Japanese
sampled city-arteries of Tokyo itself into dance and techno-influenced
American currently living in Tokyo after some
music. Meanwhile, on a compilation release of experimental/noise music,
years in France, he’s used to a certain amount of
EndID – themed around 20th-century media – Atau contributes a disturbglobal repositioning. – Andrew Pothecary
ing example of his digital/physical approach with “9M14s Over Vietnam”:
having scanned the famous Vietnam war image of the girl running naked and
More: www.sensorband.com/atau
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A RT D EPA RT M E N T: OCTOB ER 2 000
Sharing Options
Renga is an Internet-based collaborative
art form that involves one artist originating a work and then emailing it to another,
who adapts and extends it before passing it
on. As in the tradition of linked verse in
Japan, the process can continue indefinitely. Toshihiro Anzai and Rieko Nakamura
have been doing their two-artist rengas and
collaborations – see www.renga.com – for a
number of years.
In their latest collaboration, a third,
blind artist is involved. Takayuki
Mitsushima usually works with cut paper
and Letraline to get a feelable raised texture. To translate between his world and
the computer screen, his textured images
are scanned
scanned for the others to work on digitally; or if Toshihiro or
or Rieko are the originators, their works are printed by a
thermal embosser, or by an image plotter
that cuts their digital creations into paper.
They call it tactile renga. “Mitsushima
enjoys the fact that he cannot see. Rieko
and I enjoy touching art,” says Toshihiro.
The results of their collaboration can be
seen not only on the Web site, but in exhibitions scheduled for Portugal this month
and for Bali in December.
In many ways, this form of renga (the
word, by the way, comes from two characters: ren, for linked, and ga, for image) has
a non-technological, almost artistically
“primitive” feel. But, as Rieko says,
“Relating to the most advanced technology
and people who study it means relating
relating to
the most energy-filled time … renga not
only fuses technology and art, but creates
a bond between
between people.”
– Andrew Pothecary
Main picture: detail of the latest tactile renga,
which started life as the musical image above.
Below (from left): Toshihiro, Rieko, Takayuki.
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A RT D E PA RT M E N T : NOVEM BER 2 00 0
Flower
Nudes and flowers are an art staple. They can be an exercise in representing nature
through your chosen medium – how painterly can you make a petal, how petal-like
your paint; how body-like is sculpted stone, how sculptural the body?
When it comes to the digital we’re all familiar with the nudes of otaku dreams, but
for flowers try the almost tangible renderings of Mitsuo Yamaguchi: flower art that is
both unmistakably by computer yet captures a simplified beauty. He’s been making
flowers with illustration software for a while; you can see the results at his wallflower Web site (www.asahi-net.or.jp/~me6m-ymgc/wallflower/).
They’re made both for his own satisfaction and as part of a small (and getting smaller!) gathering of friends who collaborate in the yearly ARTMIX exhibition – a rented
gallery show for which Mitsuo also makes the Web site.
The flowers usually appear by themselves but have also shown up as elements in artworks: in cards, as actual lantern shades, even forming the Superman logo.
When asked to appear on this page he had only one request:
“Make it gorgeous.” – Andrew Pothecary
Show
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A RT DE PA RT M E N T : DEC EMBE R 20 00
King of
Art
Left, from top (details
except for first): a
“Protecting Cat” sculpture;
an early Yukio Mishima
poster, 1966; a poster for
“M,” Tokyo Ballet’s performance about Mishima
this year; a poster for
Glay, 1999; and
Tadanori himself (by
Andrew Pothecary)
WHAT DO SHISEIDO, THE Beatles,
‘60s literary giant Yukio Mishima, ‘90s
J-pop band Glay, Japan Rail, the allfemale revue Takarazuka, and the
Japanese postal system have in common? They’ve all participated in the
work of legendary artist Tadanori
Yokoo.
Known internationally for his
posters, Tadanori also works with
painting, sculpture, postage stamps,
and, more recently, computers. And
he’s clearly in touch with of our hightech, entrepreneurial times: earlier this
year, he set up his own Web site
(www.tadanoriyokoo.com), where the
latest addition is a shopping section
with Tadanori watches, posters, a
“Protecting Cat” souvenir sculpture,
and so on.
But while Tadanori is happy with
the digital, he’s wary of letting it control him, using computers only when
necessary. His is not the digital art of
those immersed in technology – what
you see instead are the distortions, repetitions, swirls, and reflections from
the same mind that made the wayward
multiplicity of his poster works.
The computer-made image at right
– “King of Art” – features a typical
Tadanori panorama of waterfalls and
angels. The latter motif made its
strongest showing in the early ‘90s, in
the digital works published as the book
Angel Love. Tadanori’s belief in the
existence of angels parallels both his
belief in the existence of UFOs and
aliens and his exploration, in life and
work, of Buddhism and spirituality.
While the angel era may be somewhat
in the past for him now, it is not over,
and such beliefs will be with him until
he dies – and, he adds, perhaps beyond.
It’s difficult to imagine Tadanori –
now 64 – sitting back and “retiring.”
This year saw a full retrospective in
Tokyo’s trendy Harajuku neighborhood. Meanwhile, at his studio,
Tadanori showed us plans for his next
project:three-dimensionally constructed books of his paintings.
Keep up with him if you can.
– Andrew Pothecary
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A RT DE PA RT M E N T: JA N UA RY 20 01
ONE OF THE ASPECTS of “new media”
is that sometimes — especially when the
work is so reflective of the media itself
— the delineation between the technical
and the creative becomes blur red. Of
course, this has happened throughout art
history: new technology just hastens and
emphasizes the process. John Maeda, an
adept technologist but more than that an
artist, says the delineation is pointless.
Maeda was born in America and
brought up in a family business (with the
emphasis on family) that was a particularly
Japanese one — tofu making. After studying at MIT, he completed his PhD at
Tsukuba University’s Institute of Art and
Design in Japan, where he worked as an art
director for much of the six years before he
returned to the States in 1996. The aesthetics of his work spiral around the
Japanese, American, or simply symbolic.
October last year saw the publication
of a ten-year retrospective of his work,
Maeda@Media (also published a month
later in Japanese translation). It’s a body
of work that is basically playful — sometimes the kick in his interactive work is
the “new toy” feel, as your cursor or key stroke sends
text aswirl. In his
online Shiseido calendars from 1997, you
zoom steadily from year to cur rent day to
seconds. Fun, but more “seriously,”
another aspect of this has been the freeing of letters, numbers, words, and meanings from rigidity. While the art of
printing started with fixed lead type, in
Maeda’s work it’s freed to roam, or perhaps even to create new meaning.
But while type and numbers frequently appear in his creative history, his most
recent creation (an exhibition in New
York finished last month) concentrates on
the pure form (see below), always apparent in his work.
In explaining this shift in emphasis,
he describes his new work as,
interestingly, a “repentant”
move away from numbers,
letters, et cetera.
He now runs a design
studio with his wife
(www.maedastudio.com)
and holds an endowed
chair at MIT, where
he’s been known to
ask someone creating
work how
they’d
The
Maeda
Touch
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make it different if it were being done for
a girlfriend or boyfriend. That’s part of the
point in his creations: whether it’s new
technology for its own sake, commercial
work, or a celebration of form, he frees
technology from the constraining zero-one
mindset of so many digital creators.
It’s been said that in the future a scientist will be the new artist. Maeda disagrees and clarifies that thought: “It will
be a new kind of artist.”
— Andrew Pothecary
■
A RT D E PA RT M E N T: F EBRUA RY 2001
Out of the Dark
Toshio Iwai has run the gamut from film student and
flip-book fan to creator of self-programmed computer
art and interactive image/music/technology works. It’s
funny how someone who modestly describes himself as
“not an expert” in music, programming, or robotics has
been honored with a permanent exhibit at the NTT
InterCommunication Center, created a performance
with international musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, and
attracted the attention of a professional robotics designer with his recent “Happy
Technology Lab” exhibit.
The latter, a collaboration
with illustrator Kayo Baba, was
more playful than his previous
works. Whereas earlier pieces like
The Well of Lights (above) were
hypnotic and beautiful with a technological glow in
darkened galleries, “Happy Technology Lab” was set up
like a science show for kids, with illustrations and
kitsch explanations covering the walls.
It was also highly interactive. You could use your
cellphone to call an animated character, whose own
keitai would ring a bird-call chakumero attracting
cartoon birds. Or take a lens-covered sensor around
the gallery to hear musical tones generated by different
light sources. (Imagine walking around night-time
Shibuya plugged into this instead of your MiniDisc
player.) Or take a handheld game console and play a
kind of music piece or make a character dance, the former being a solo version of his earlier Resonance of 4,
an interactive gallery-size work for four people.
(Interestingly, Iwai used the Bandai platform instead of
Nintendo’s GameBoy — because the former made
available its development kit.)
Iwai had also wondered what happens when you
become bored with your Aibo and it ends up sitting
unused in a corner. Hence the development of his box
robot (above), which sleeps when left untouched, opens
its eyes when picked up, and spins its eyes drunkenly
and burbles when tilted. And when you get bored?
It’s a useful box!
The idea is to humanize technology — and remind
us to not take things too seriously.
— Andrew Pothecary
Note:Another Iwai show is planned for sometime this year in Harajuku’s La Foret Museum.
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A R T D E PA RT M E N T: MA RCH 2 001
Artists of the Floating Words
IT’S A SMALL
WORLD, digital
arts. For example, as
a junior at Tsukuba
University, artist Satoko Moroi
admired the work of a senior named
John Maeda, who I profiled in the December 2000 Art
Department. And Toshio Iwai, introduced here in the
January issue, attended the same program.
But it’s a small world getting bigger. Moroi now
teaches at Japan Electronics College, a vocational
school where hundreds of students study computer
graphics and prepare to contribute to the ever enlarging gene pool of digital design.
At the school (but as her own project), Moroi has
teamed with programmer Shinji Sasada to create the
entertaining word-play piece pictured here. Speak into
a voice trumpet attached above a pool and water drips
onto the surface, creating a starting point from which
your words appear and … float off. You can give them
a stir with an electromagnetic wand.
Of course, it's actually a mixture of
voice-recognition (at the moment
using only words that are pre-programmed into the computer) and 3D
graphics software projecting words
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onto a screen
beneath the
water. The trumpet is
a recorder: your voice
activates a pump that draws up
the water and dribbles it into the spot
where the program will begin the word cycle. It’s a
nice illusion: the words would start without the
drops. (The wand works by wirelessly feeding the
computer directional instructions.)
The piece has that playful, child-at-heart spirit of
the games you probably played in swimming pools and
sand boxes as a kid. And it’s fun, which seems to be
mostly Moroi’s aim. Even when it doesn’t work it’s fun:
one editor's words just translated into a floating anata
kirai (“I don’t like you”) whatever she tried to say. Last
year Moroi and Sasada created paper-folded “doughnuts” — multiple-sided möbius-like wreaths of computer-designed paper that you folded into shape by
following the printed directions. It won a prize from a
town in Shizuoka known for paper
crafts. The piece shown here got the
artists onto a popular TV show,
where the rapid-fire words of a
comedian couldn't get a single word
out of it. — Andrew Pothecary
APRIL 2 001
A RT D E PA RT M E N T
AWAY FROM THE TRADITIONAL gallery areas,
the Command-N art space sits in a side street in
Akihabara’s “electric town,” among the shops and
street vendors who sell everything you need for
computing.
Late last year Command-N hosted the DISCODER
exhibition by exonemo, a duo of twenty-something creators Yae Akaiwa and Kensuke Sembo. The piece features
a computer connected to the Internet, and projected onto
the wall behind it you see the source code of any Web
page you select. But instead of a keyboard, there are
mouses corresponding to each key. When you click a
mouse, the number or letter of the key it represents is
sent onto the page, sometimes flying into the page’s display text, sometimes into the source code. Over time, the
insertions change picture position, text, color, and eventually coherence until the page is unrecognizable.
Call it minor technological terrorism — the satisfaction lies in “bombing” a site (which is downloaded onto
the gallery computer so the original remains unharmed)
until it is no longer usable. This may sound anti-technology, but that’s not the creators’ intent. exonemo say they
see increasing technology as a good thing: “Sometimes we
feel strange about people’s hysterical disgust and [resistance to technology]. We should find a new meaning by
viewing that feeling from another angle.”
One highlight of DISCODER is its simultaneous celebration and disintegration of technology. The show’s Akihabara location (it has been
set up in other galleries and is on exenomo’s Web site)
was almost as much a part of the piece as the original
idea. When I saw it, DISCODER was linked to an unofficial PC seller on the street, so the site you gradually
destroyed (or created?) inside the art space was seen on a
for-sale PC outside. A display of technological destruction
and creation among the electric shops — where, incidentally, all the mouses for the show had been bought.
exonemo say they were pleased to be able to show work
outside of the “bioclean galleries, where an accident could
never happen even if a dangerous virus were to be cultivated.” No danger of confusing that with Akihabara!
The duo feel primarily at home in the “huge and
unstable database of the Internet” — to which they’re
returning after recent gallery-based shows. (See www
.exonemo.com for their latest ideas.) Their curation by
Command-N this time around was apposite: The nonprofit collective also runs “Akihabara TV,” where artists’
works appear on TVs in Akihabara’s shops. Its next edition will be in spring 2002. Watch this space.
— Andrew Pothecary
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A RT D E PA RT M E N T: MAY 20 01
Thinking Out
of the Box
All of the people that I met
in the first decades of my
life, with most of the other
people in the world, have
met their end …
In the years after this
great disaster, the world
completely changed. People
… cities … everything … disappeared under the sea …
This is not something
about lamenting over death,
nor is it a blessing in the
form of new life — in fact,
it’s not even something that
we can pursue … it is simply
about choosing death for
ourselves as a race.
And yet, we survive.
This is the place where
perfect harmony and equality dwell. — Excerpt from Mie, in
Miwa Yanagi’s My Grandmothers series
A COUPLE OF YEARS back, Miwa Yanagi’s computer-assembled pictures featured
replicant office ladies in bland malls and offices — a disturbing world that was neither
real nor science fiction. (Yanagi says it was “neither the past, the present, nor the
future, just a mixture of my desire and nightmare.”)
Her current work has shifted, although it still contains similar aspects. She’s
working on a series of pictures called My Grandmothers, in which she invites young
women to imagine themselves in 50 years’ time. She borrows their ideas to create her
own imagined grandmothers and ideal older women. While she uses the computer
less this time around, it is still (as in Mie, above) a tool that helps to assemble the situation, creating an indeterminate yet somehow real world.
Yanagi is aware of technology’s uses and limitations, and she allows the expression of both in her work. When a new technology is introduced, at first there can be
something “off” about artwork that uses it — something she sees as part of the conflict between the “soft” (imagination) and “hard” (material) of a piece. She let that
something percolate into her earlier work, and it lingers in her new creations — maybe
because she sees something “off” in society anyway. She perceives of working in society “like performing in a narrow box,” which stems from the mechanical, mindless
routines she observed on her commute as a teacher through shopping areas (“If you
look at that kind of place all the time you start wanting to destroy it,” she says).
But where the women in her previous work seemed almost blithely trapped in such
a world, the subjects in her new work are freer — even when living happily in an endof-civilization world like Mie.
You’ve just missed her exhibition in Osaka, but it will be part of the Yokohama
Triennale in September. Meanwhile, see http: //pws.prserv.net/mygrandma for ongoing
images, or even to volunteer yourself as your imagined grandma. @
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A RT D E PA RT M E N T: JU NE 2001
Opposite, top to bottom: The
End’s start screen; Tadanori
Yokoo’s 1968 01; Delaware and
Hajime Tachibana’s “A” from
aRtOOn No. 2.
Below, top to bottom: 1968 01
on a monochrome screen, about
actual size; Hajime’s Graveyard
Severed Hand; Shepard Fairey’s
Obey Renewal Logo ; excerpt
from Akira Asada’s i-critique
essay; Middle Class from “Fucked
Up and Photocopied”
WHEN THE NET TOOK off, people
immediately started creating art adapted
to this new medium — a medium that
was based on low-res images and short
attention spans but that had new possibilities, including immediacy, animation,
and a large audience.
But what about keitai? Shorter attention spans, lower resolution images, minimal animation and, this time, even less
text option. Why even bother?
But one musician and graphic designer,
Hajime Tachibana, has given it a go. On
his i-mode site The End (http://210
.145.16.92), he and selected collaborators
make pictures that are essentially screen
images to display when the phone is idle;
they also write essays of a few hundred
The Start of Something Small …
characters and compose alternatives to the
usual chakumelo. Much of this you could,
of course, do yourself — and if you are no
artist, the low-res screens may even disguise the lack of quality.
Tachibana changes the offerings regularly (indeed, a static i-mode site would
lose the audience more quickly than a static Web site), and you can choose among
the featured guests and artworks. A selection from the book “Fucked Up and
Photocopied,” for example, which is about
slapdash punk flyer art, lends itself to further deterioration in repro quality.
Tadanori Yokoo (see “King of Art,” page
78, December 2000), whose work is
known for its multiplexity, contributes
images simple enough (almost) for even
black-and-white screens. The weakest
point on The End’s site may be the tunes.
A musician friend was not impressed with
the site’s offerings when I showed him.
Tunes are no easier to compose on keitai
than anywhere — especially so, perhaps,
for my non-harmonic phone.
Whether you want to pay ¥300 a
month for the entertainment is up to you.
It is a way to while away those moments
waiting for a train — or, as I often see in
Japan, when you are bored talking with
your partner in a restaurant. What’s most
interesting is simply that Tachibana is
trying it out. And, as he told the Japan
Times, he can get 10,000 hits a day —
10,000 visits a month would make a hit in
gallery terms. So, who’s to judge whether
a 120 x 120–dot image really rates as art?
— Andrew Pothecary
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