Installations
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INSTALLATIONS DUMB TYPE - installations Installations Cascade 3 frost frames 4 IRIS 5 Love/Sex/Death/Money/Life 6 Lovers 7 [OR] installation 8 Voyages 9 dumb type dumb type, an artist collective 10 History 11 Biographies 12 Selected performances & exhibitions 15 Contacts Cascade Video director Shiro Takatani Music Ryoji Ikeda Lighting Takayuki Fujimoto Choreographers Noriko Sunayama Takao Kawaguchi Manager Yoko Takatani Production dumb type Co-produced by Change Performing Arts Milano With the support of Kyoto Art Center Cascade by dumb type in Milan (2000) © Change Performing Arts Milano “Now we freeze in front of a frozen cascade like losing one’s focus towards too fast phenomena. The safe and sheltering forest of memory is no more. Nostalgic reminiscences of happy days, sweet dreams of future memories to come… We stand before the falling waters, waiting for the perfect moment to plunge in. Let us meet under the waterfall.” Dumb Type Cascade is the installation/performance related to dumb type show memorandum, , an investigation of memory (loss) in a cascade of white noise and stroboscopic light flood. The visitor, whose existence is part of the installation, strolls around in a 3 metre-wide aisle with two giant screens on either side. Projected images and live performers form the walls of the installation. Commissioned by the Milan Design Salon in 2000, Cascade was the large entrance installation of the enormous architectural exhibition "Rooms and Secrets" at the Rotonda della Besana, Milan (Italy) leading to rooms by Peter Greenaway, Emir Kusturica and Bob Wilson. It was also presented in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in March/April 2001. 3 frost frames by Shiro Takatani The fast-projected images are a series of images shot by DV (digital video camera) with an electronic high-speed shutter of 1/10000 second. Each digital image is shown per 1/30 second. The images from one projector are taken from landscapes, and the other from the human body. They are not created by visual effects, but are actually shot automatically from a DV attached to a moving vehicle or machine. The digital recordings, which are imperceptible to the naked eye, are reduced to the analogue state, perceptible by the human eye. These images are not the feedback from human senses and perception, but are what electronics have seen and generated as image-mechanic /machinic. The images are dissected and expanded by high- speed technology. They penetrate our eyes as frost frames by Shiro Takatani in Créteil (2000) © Emmanuel Valette "tranquil but crazy images" (Shiro Takatani), or whiteout (Doesn't the system have similarities with Like a focusing glass in a camera, a square sheet of the system of human memory?). frosted glass stands as a screen. Different images are projected on the glass screen from both sides, The sound creation by Ryoji Ikeda, co-operating in so that one can see the images from the projector the production, is in tandem with the changing of the other side. When one crosses before the memory counter, and generates breaks, along with projector on one side, there appears no shadow, the images, by random stop. but a silhouette is visible on the other side. The image of "whiteout" in frost frames shares the This method of projection makes the screen exist as same concept with dumb type's work [OR] (1997- a non-materialistic membrane, not merely as a 1999), for which Shiro Takatani is a core member. representative space for image projection. It reminds us that the self-shadow from inside Plato's Initially created for Canon ARTLAB at the Spiral cave becomes a metaphor for the existing world, Hall in Tokyo in Mai 1998, frost frames has since and it hides the essence of images as membrane. been presented in Lyons, Créteil, Maubeuge This device for the duality of sight creates an (2000), Sendai (2001), Toulouse (2002) and interface for another side of the world, each Jerusalem (2005/2006). affecting one another. 4 IRIS IRIS is a special creation for the Valencia Biennial (Spain) This 120m long fog sculpture was presented in June 2001 at the Tinglado in the Valencia seaport. creation Nature in its infinite possibilities, perceived simultaneously in totality and partial chaos. Shiro Takatani Time, space and consciousness, re-examined from In collaboration with shifting vantage points. Fujiko Nakaya The present work combines a curved fog sculture with conception and video creation projected images to compose an entire day in time and Shiro Takatani space. supervisor of fog sculptures Fujiko Nakaya The viewer sees both the sunlight, wind, artificial lighting, technical director and lighting design chaotic structures on the level of fog particle motion, as Takayuki Fujimoto video assistant well as a perfectly circular halo and other elements Richi Owaki reflected back in entirety. performer Noriko Sunayama The viewer becomes aware of the infinitely changing dumb type manager possibilities in line of sight, in timing, in weather Yoko Takatani conditions, aware of people's ever-inconstant perspectives. IRIS by Shiro Takatani at the 1st Valencia Biennial (2001) © dumb type 5 LOVE/SEX/DEATH/MONEY/LIFE version 1999 6 LOVERS Dying Pictures, Loving Pictures Lovers by Teiji Furuhashi in Tokyo (1994) © ARTLAB, Canon Inc. Lovers is an installation created in 1994 by the now-deceased Teiji Furuhashi, one of the founding members of the dumb type artistic collective. This work, performed in conjunction with dumb type’s show S/N, examines love, the body and information. The spectators enter a closed room. In the darkness, spectres of naked men and woman walk, run, cross paths, embrace each other and then leave again, all of this taking place in a mood of immense calm. Their movements are slow, suspended, as in a dream. From time to time, a new character appears on the wall… it is none other than the artist himself. As he comes to face the spectator, he stops, turns and then offers himself up by spreading his arms open as though he were on a crucifix. He then disappears in a slow tumbling backward motion. The aesthetic that this effect of disappearance produces is one of a profound gentleness. The silent bodies continue to move around. Lovers has been exhibited in Tokyo, Munich, Linz, Barcelone, New York, Frankfurt, Lyons, Créteil, Maubeuge, Glasgow, Sendai, Shanghai. 7 Four long slabs of glass are laid on a white carpet, Video images of men and women are projected onto surfaces of the glass. The glass and the carpet warp the images. As a result, there are immaterial images and material sounds. The images of lying men and women will metamorphose when sensors detect the visitor. The work is a meditation on the "grey humor" overhanging the space between life and death. Four body-length "laboratory slides" are laid out on a sterile white carpet, each "slab" consisting of two glass plates sandwiching an LCD film that switches ON/OFF between semi-opaque and transparent. [OR] installation by dumb type in Tokyo (1997) © The glass and carpet serve to distress the ICC- InterCommunication Center, Tokyo projected images, and to obstruct /reflect/absorb sound. The four flat images display human presence In 1997, dumb type created the show [OR]. without depth. In turn, these images are placed in grid formation Looked from various view points, be it religious, like scanning/sorting "beds" in a hypothetical philosophical, medical, cultural or emotional, on a holding area, a zone of watched manifestation. stage flooded in flickering light, with an advanced technique of combining bodies, images, video, The video transforms of seven men and women sounds and lighting, [OR] is a "grey humour" which are mapped onto the surfaces, are multiple reflection on the border(s) between life and death. possibilities, which at the point of projection appear singularly "real" while the remaining visions are Also entitled [OR], a related installation piece, was stripped away as impossible unrealities. The commissioned by the Inter Communication Center computer-controlled laser disc system implicitly (ICC) in Tokyo for its opening in April 1997 and is renders forth only one sample out of many. now part of its permanent collection. The exhibited version from 2000 is part of the In contrast to the non-materiality of the visuals, the permanent collection of the Musée d’Art invisible non-directionality of sound shapes an Contemporain, Lyons (France). unobtrusive aural ambience. Visitors are free to This artwork was also exhibited by the CDC in walk around in the room but remain "outside" the Toulouse (2002) and Lille 2004 - European Capital sound, until hidden sensors detect their intervening of Culture in Lille (2004). movements, and arouse slight shifts in the planar foci, disturbances in the projected images and displacements in the audio. 8 VOYAGES Voyage through Multilayered Realities By Eiji Yamamori in Asahi Shimbun. 11/11/2002 dumb type, whose artistic activities in the international arena since the '80s cut across art, theater and music, began from the mid-'90s to incorporate digital visuals and music in more strongly conceptual and speculative directions. In their recent work Voyages, exhibited at the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Shinjuku, Tokyo, this tendency makes for even greater freedom of interpretation. A succession of images of forests, harbors and other familiar scenes projected upon a narrow panel laid across the floor of a darkened interior are superimposed with two circles showing a network of flight routes. The visual confusion caused by this overlapping of perspectives of Voyages by dumb type in Tokyo (2002) © Kazuo Fukunaga two different levels is not unlike the experience of verifying one's location using a global positioning system (GPS) while driving, a dizzying sense of vertigo from looking down on oneself from the air.