The MIRL is pleased to present Rhythm of Video Feedback, a video installation, live performance, and talk taking place on Monday, February 29, 2015. Performance and talk/Q&A takes place from 4:30-6:30, with the installation open from 1 – 7 PM. Masayuki Kawai builds a video feedback system composed of dozens of analog audio-visual devices. He shows the machine on site as an installation and operates it as live performance as well.
Kawai’s “Video Feedback” works are made with an analog video feedback from a closed circuit system with free-flowing electronic data. No outer video/sound source is used; the video machines and circuits contain subtle noises that are amplified in the loop to generate infinite data flows. When these are put into the video input, they display various figure and colour mutations. When these are channeled into the audio input, they make sounds that are synchronized with the image. It is impossible to make these images and sounds by computer programming-simulation because the digital process eliminates the noise and gives privilege to the signals. Thus, through these works, we directly experience an organic creation of singularity with analog electronic video. Daisuke Harashima extracts from the installation and performance a concept of glitch as a rhythm of recursive generation of a pattern which is simultaneously singular and multiple. With the paradoxical concept of glitch, he explores the real and virtual power of a non-digital and in-formal logic as the potential of the technological environment.
Masayuki Kawai was born in 1972. He creates video works in a unique style that takes radical visions of philosophy and politics from the standpoint of the consideration and criticism of informational society and the essence of media. He explores his broad styles and activities unconstrained by existing genres such as films, contemporary arts, and media arts. His works have been shown in over 30 countries and has received numerous awards in media art festivals and exhibitions around the world. A collection of his works can be seen at the Queens Museum of Art in New York (U.S.) and at the National Museum of Art in Osaka (Japan). He was invited to as an artist in residence from the Jerusalem Center for Visual Arts, ISCP in NY, and Le Cube and Cite International des arts in Paris with support from the Jerusalem Foundation, Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japanese Government, POLA Art Foundation, Tokyo Wonder Site, City Government of Paris and Culturesfrance. To establish a critical role for video art in the society of spectacle, Kawai as a video artist, curator, and writer, directed a number of enlightening and challenging exhibitions and festivals and published an insightful book under the concept of “visual philosophy”. He holds a B.A. in aesthetics and M.A. in representation and culture from University of Tokyo. Website: http://masayukikawai.com/
Daisuke Harashima is a PhD student in Arts and Sciences at University of Tokyo. His research interests are information theories (from cybernetics and a mathematical theory or formal logic of communication, to second-order cybernetics, autopoiesis, transcendental empiricism, radical constructivism, fundamental informatics, neocybernetics, etc.) and media arts (focusing on the way they work out paradoxical ambiguities of freedoms and constraints, and self-producing sensors for singularities in present technological environment; collective activities; glitches and vibrations as sensuous continuums; verbal and virtual communications; ethico-aesthetic ecologies; improvisational morals of artificial and embodied intelligences; informal informations of insufficient reason and included middle). Among his publications are “Prediction and Production: Technological Singularity and Living Singularity.” in Gendai-Shiso (The Contemporary Thought)[Japanese] and “Close-and-Open: A Neocybernetic Approach to the Living System Condition in the Information Technological Environment.” Journal of Information and Media Studies [Japanese]. He also plays as a dj, vj or programmer/operator for media live performances. His recent work includes a video projection for a reenaction of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Requiem für einen jungen Dichter” at Suntory Hall (Tokyo), and video projections and stage settings for live performances of scscs (Nagoya and Tokyo) and number0 (Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nagoya). Website: http://digital-narcis.org/Daisuke-HARASHIMA/
This a satellite performance of ACTE: Volumes, taking place at La Vitriola on Friday, February 26 at 8 PM. For more information, please see the Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1057265577629183/ or Resident Advisor listing: http://www.residentadvisor.net/event.aspx?803770
On Friday, January 29th 2016, the MIRL will be hosting a screening of Kamal Aljafari’s Recollection (2015). The Isreali and American features shot in the town of Jaffa from the 1960s to the 1990s are the basis for the story of a dream. All protagonists are removed from the original footage, leaving an empty settlement formed by the town. Thus, the impossible is made from the “I” perspective, namely filming the past and compiling a picture album made of memories.
(Still from Ali Shan (2013) dir. Yung Chang)
Moving Image Research Lab 