Roger and Karen Reynolds /
The American Center Japan
Mary Evan
Seiichi Fujii
Michael Goldberg
Mako Idemitsu
Akiko Iimura
Takahiko Iimura

Yukihisa Isobe
Kenji Kanesaka
Takehisa Kosugi
Shigeko Kubota
Alvin Lucier
Mary Lucier
Kyoko Michishita

Composer Roger Reynolds (b.1934, US) is known for his integration of diverse ideas and resources, and for seamlessly blending traditional musical sounds and those now enabled by technology into a hybrid sound world. His work responds to texts both poetic (Beckett, Borges, Dickinson, Ashbery) and mythological (Aeschylus, Euripides, Heraclitus). He is noted for “wizardry in sending music flying through space: whether vocal, instrumental, or computerized." In 1969, Reynolds accepted a tenured appointment to UC San Diego and helped establish its Music Department as a destination program. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1989. 

Karen Reynolds (b. 1940) has been Roger’s creative companion and collaborator since the early 1960s, first as a flutist, then also as an editor and designer in relation to their many joint projects. In the early 1960s both received Fulbright grants: Roger to Köln and Karen to Paris. In 1966, they were awarded a Fellowship from the Institute for Current World Affairs, and spent 3 years living in Tokyo, returning for a half-year again in 1977. During their time there in the ‘60s, they collaborated with composer Jōji Yuasa and critic Kuniharu Akiyama, as well as American Cultural Center Director Donald Albright, producing a number of individual CROSS TALK events in association with ACC and Asahi Shimbun. In 1969, a culminating festival – CROSS TALK INTERMEDIA – was held in Kenzo Tange’s Olympic Gymnasium. Its three days of concerts attracted 10,000 people.

The Reynolds returned to the US in the Fall of 1969, where Roger took up a tenured Associate Professorship at the UC San Diego Department of Music. The Reynolds continued to create events collaboratively, including “The Pacific Ring Festival” in 1986 at UC San Diego, “Xenakis@UCSD” in 1990, and “John Cage Centennial Washington, DC” in 2012 with composer Steve Antosca. Roger guest curated the “66th American Music Festival” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 2 – 22, 2015.

The Reynolds have co-authored two books: PASSAGE (a 2017 art book including texts written by Roger, with a collection of related images, published by Wise Music Classical/Peters) and also Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House (Routledge, 2022).

Michael Goldberg (b. 1945, Canada) was a pioneer of video and an instrumental figure in nurturing its early days in Vancouver and Japan. Friendly with Fujiko Nakaya through the organization E.A.T. (Experiments in Art & Technology), he first came to Japan in 1971 on a grant from the Canada Council, and in 1972 along with Nakaya and Katsuhiro Yamaguchi organized Japan's first video art exhibition. Held at the Sony building in Ginza, Tokyo, the exhibit-cum-workshop was entitled Video Communication: Do It Yourself Kit, and would become the catalyst for the formation of the video collective Video Hiroba. Goldberg also taught as a guest lecturer at Tsukuba University in 1980. Today he remains active as a producer and director of documentaries and other video forms through his company International Videoworks, Inc.

Akiko Iimura (b. 1936) is a writer, translator and filmmaker who has spent much of her life in New York. During her study at Waseda University from which she graduated in 1958, Akiko Iimura met Takahiko Iimura in the film club at the university.

Once Takahiko left for the US in 1966 and joined the Filmmakers’ Coorperative in New York, she joined him a year after. Immersed in the film circle, Akiko began to take interest in film, often exchanging opinions with Takahiko, eventually leading her to make film with Takahiko. with whom she collaborated on several projects, including Blinking (1970), Double Portrait (1973-87) and I Love You (1973-87). Her own film works include Mon Petit Album (1973), a poetic film set to the music of Jacques Bekaert, and Late Lunch (1985).

In the early 1970s she was an active reporter on and translator of the New York underground scene for both Bijutsu techō and Eiga hihyō. She was also instrumental in translating the writings of Jonas Mekas into Japanese, including Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 and I Had Nowhere to Go. She became the editor-in-chief of New York's Japanese-language newspaper OCS News from 1982-1995.

Yukihisa Isobe (b. 1935) began his career as an avant-garde painter in Japan before relocating to New York in 1965 where he moved into the field of urban and ecological planning. In the summer of 1965, after visiting Europe for a solo exhibition at a Venice gallery, Isobe traveled around Europe, then visited New York and settled there, remaining in the USA until the mid-seventies. Isobe was already interested in modular constructions using wood, when he saw Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome at the 1967 Montreal Expo, and became interested in new materials and structures. Initially interested in tent and hanging structures, he gradually focused on constructed air structures using vinyl material. His Double Skin Structure (1968) was presented in “Some More Beginnings”Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” exhibition of 1968 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. His interest in air as a material for art creation next led to creating a canopy-shaped parachute held aloft by air blown from below, titled Floating Theater. In a multi-media performance undertaken in spring 1969, Dream Reel, filmmaker Jud Yalkut projected film imagery on Isobe’s parachute canopy and added music. During the same period, Isobe collaborated with Light Art artists, Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern, in producing “Theater of Light.” After embarking on a project using a hot air balloon through his employment with the New York City parks department, Isobe was then invited to participate in organizing the Summer Happening in New York City’s Hart Island for Phoenix House, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility. He collaborated with David Behrman in 1969 on a balloon-driven remote audio feedback system which served as the basis for their unrealized Pepsi Pavilion event proposal for Expo ‘70.
In 1970, he entered the seminar of Professor Ian McHarg at the University of Pennsylvania in order to study ecological planning, eventually writing his master of arts thesis about ecological planning for Hart Island as the site of a therapeutic community for Phoenix House. His project Air Dome, was a temporary interactive structure installed in Union Square in 1970 in honor of Earth Day. In the mid-1970s Isobe returned to Japan and took the skills he learned from Ian McHarg to help with the urban planning for various regions in Japan, utilizing ecological inventorying and mapping landscapes. Isobe returned to artmaking in the 1990s with a series of large-scale collages titled Ecological Context, and environmental installations produced for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale. Many of his works are now housed at the SoKo Museum (Isobe Yukihisa Memorial Echigo Tsumari Kiyotsu Soko Museum of Art) in Niigata.
https://yukihisaisobe.jp/

Takehisa Kosugi (1938-2018) was a composer, performer, and founding member of Group Ongaku, along with Yasunao Tone, Mieko Shiomi and others. Toshi Ichiyanagi advised Kosugi and the group to send recordings to George Maciunas, which was the start of their involvement with the Fluxus movement in the early 1960s. After Kosugi moved to New York City in 1965, he collaborated with international Fluxus artists like Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman. A notable performance from this period was Kosugi’s Film & Film #4 (1965), involving a film-less projector that projects light onto a paper screen which was cut in a square shape starting in the center, gradually cut into larger squares. This piece was later cited as an inspiration by Hollis Frampton. 

Kosugi returned to Japan in 1967, and co-founded a multimedia improvisation group Taj Mahal Travellers in 1969. The Taj Mahal Travellers participated in Utopia & Visions in Stockholm (1971), and toured on a van in Europe, and through the Southwest Asia region, reaching Taj Mahal in India. TM, a filmwork by Kosugi, was made for the First 100 Feet Film Festival, organized by Image Forum in 1974. It is composed of images shot in Tokyo with a unique perspective and rhythm, is Kosugi’s first work using film material. He returned to the US in 1977 and became a resident composer/performer at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Alvin Lucier (1931-2021) was an American composer, sound artist, professor at Wesleyan University, and member of the influential Sonic Arts Union. Lucier met Takahiko Iimura when the latter was first invited to Harvard University in 1966, at which time Lucier was living in Boston. The two went on to collaborate on Shelter 9999, a performance piece involving live music and projections which had multiple iterations during the late 1960s, including at a disco club in the East Village. Photo by Amanda Lucier.

Kyōko Michishita (b. 1942) is a Japanese artist, writer, and translator based in Tokyo. With her belief in pacifism, feminism and art, she has been writing and translating books and articles for almost four decades. Born in Yuzhno-Sahalinsk in 1942, she and her family escaped to Hokkaido, Japan the year after the end of World War II. She studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1967. From 1970 through 1997 she served as the Arts Program Specialist of the Tokyo American Center, where she presented the most vital creativity and inovativeness expressed in all forms of art and culture in contemporary US society. The introduction of experimental work in both film and video by such artists as Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekas, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and many others, for example, had a great impact on various artists in Japan.

In the 1970s Michishita was a member of the collective Video Hiroba, and began producing her own films and videos in 1974. Her video Being Women in Japan: Liberation within My Family (1973-74) is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and her other films and videos have been screened at festivals, galleries, and museums across Japan and internationally. She has published several Japanese translations of work by and about Gloria Steinem and Georgia O’Keeffe, among others. Her own books include the essay collection Sensual Life (1980), the autobiographical nonfiction Farewell to Sakhalin (1996), and the novel The Blue Hour (2008). 

Fujiko Nakaya (b.1933, Sapporo) was an instrumental figure in the rise of video art in Japan. Her work has been primarily based in Japan, but she attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois from 1954-1957 and has worked on various video art exhibits in New York and elsewhere, including the seminal "Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto" at MoMA in 1979, curated by Barbara London.

Nakaya became involved with the activities of Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver’s organization Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.) in the late 1960s, unofficially as a performer in Deborah Hay’s Solo in 1966, but officially in 1969 as the Japanese coordinator for the Pepsi Pavilion project at Osaka’s EXPO ‘70. As a part of the Pepsi Pavilion’s multisensory expanded art experiments, Nakaya created her first fog sculpture which enveloped the exterior of the pavilion in mist of water droplets that would interact with local atmospheric conditions. Nakaya was also a co-founder and key organizer of Video Hiroba, and coordinated the scheduling of equipment access for the group’s first exhibition at the Sony Building in 1972. She was also a key point of contact between the US and Japanese art scenes given her fluency in English and connections to E.A.T. . She produced the first Japanese translation of Michael Shamberg's alternative media manual Guerrilla Television, and founded the Video Gallery SCAN in Harajuku, which from 1980-1992 exhibited works by both Japanese and international artists, including Bill Viola, New York's DCTV (founded by Keiko Tsuno), and Nam June Paik.

An active video artist herself, Nakaya's work was often concerned with both natural and social ecologies. In her representative early work, Friends of Minamata Victims - Video Diary (1972), Nakaya filmed a sit-in in front of the Chisso Corporation headquarters where demonstrators were protesting the company's water pollution with mercury, playing the video back immediately to the protesters to raise their awareness of the impact of their own actions. 

Image: Brotherton-Lock, Courtesy of Tate, copyright Fujiko Nakaya

Donald Richie (1924-2013) was an American film historian, a long-term resident of Japan, and one of the most significant mediators between Japanese postwar cinema and the West. After first traveling to Japan as part of the US Occupation Forces in the immediate postwar, Richie collaborated with film producer Kashiko Kawakita to promote the likes of Yasujiro Ōzu and Akira Kurosawa in the English-speaking world. He would subsequently spend much of his working life in Tokyo, writing books and film criticism for various publications, although he spent three years as Curator of Film at MoMA from 1969-72. Richie was also an active creator in the postwar artistic avant-garde, notably co-founding Film Indépendent and collaborating with performance troupe Zero Jigen to direct the 1968 film Cybele: A Pastoral Ritual in Five Scenes.

Video Hiroba was one of the first video collectives in Japan, formed on the occasion of the 1972 exhibition held in the Sony Building in Ginza entitled Video Communications: Do-It-Yourself Kit, where Canadian video artist Michael Goldberg helped introduce the new Sony Portapak. Organized chiefly by Fujiko Nakaya and Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, original members included Hakudō Kobayashi, Miyai Rikurō, Matsumoto Toshio, Ichiyanagi Toshi, and Yoshiaki Tōno. Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Sakumi Hagiwara, Seiichi Fujii, Hara Eizaburō, and Nakahara Michitaka had also participated in the first exhibition and were listed as members by the time of the group’s first self-published journal in September 1972. The group’s membership was fluid, with other artists, such as Michishita Kyōko and Morihiro Wada, joining later and some, notably Idemitsu Mako, participating in group exhibitions without officially joining the membership.

The group organized exhibitions including Video Week: Open Retina Grab Your Image in October 1972, a collaborative event with US practitioners including a workshop & symposium, and Tokyo-New York Video Express at the Tenjōsaijiki Hall in January 1974, which Shigeko Kubota helped to organize. Alongside their exhibitions, Video Hiroba held video workshops, published a journal entitled Video Express, and rented out their collectively-owned Sony Portapak cheaply to their own members. The group also produced work collectively, notably the 1973 project Study of Participation Methods for New and Current Residents in Urban Development Planning, which experimented with mediating the relationship between citizens and local bureaucrats in the urban redevelopment of central Yokohama via video as a communications technology ; and the Green Plaza PR Center project at Tōhoku Electric Power Company’s Niigata branch office. 

The Sparks were a collective composed of couples Takahiko and Akiko Iimura, and Alvin and Mary Lucier, who worked across experimental cinema, music, sound art and performance art. They group collaborated to perform at least one iteration of Takahiko and Alvin’s piece, Shelter 9999.

Mary Evans (1930-2020) was an American writer who, after graduating from Wellesley College, traveled to Japan on a Fulbright scholarship. There she socialized with many artists and intellectuals of the postwar avant-garde, writing articles documenting the artistic performances and happenings taking place in Tokyo in the 1960s—such as Tatsumi Hijikata's butoh—for an American readership. She was married to the filmmaker and critic Donald Richie from 1961-1965, and after their divorce, took up residence in New York. Although not known as a filmmaker, Evans contributed a 2-minute film, Gomi/Garbage, to the first Film Indépendent event, Commercial for Myself, in December 1964.

Seiichi Fujii (b.1948, Okayama, Japan) was a member of the collective Video Hiroba and the creator of Body Wave, a 1971 documentary about the Taj Mahal Travellers. He exhibited his work in various locations in Japan and the US during the 1970s, including Millennium Film in NYC, Canyon Cinematheque in San Francisco, and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley. He participated in the 1975 "Video Art" exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia with his work Mantra (1973). In addition to Body Wave, a documentation of his performance, Kite, in which a wireless mic was installed on a kite and emitted sound while the kite was in air by a beach, is presented in the exhibition.

Mako Idemitsu (b.1940, Tokyo, Japan) is a film and video artist whose works explore her inner struggle and identity as a woman, wife, daughter, mother, and a foreigner looking for a home abroad.  The daughter of prominent businessman and art collector Sazo Idemitsu, she left Japan to attend graduate school in New York and subsequently relocated to Los Angeles in 1965, resulting in her being disowned by her father. There, Idemitsu began making Super-8 works addressing women’s issues, inspired by the community of feminist artists in California including Judy Chicago. She returned to Japan in the 1970s after her divorce from the American painter Sam Francis, at which point she embarked on video experiments that solidified her status as a pioneer of video. Through her friendship with Morihiro Wada, she became loosely involved with Video Hiroba while creating progressively more complex works exploring gender, subjectivity and identity, often through the framework of psychoanalysis. Idemitsu is known for her idiosyncratic technique of including a monitor embedded within a scene in a video work to represent a subconscious inner self, known as “Mako-style.”
https://makoidemitsu.com/

Takahiko Iimura (1937-2022) was a hugely influential avant-garde film and video artist. He was active in the arts in Tokyo since the early 1960s, and starting with his first film, Junk (1962), he was prolific in the avant-garde art scene with involvement with VAN Film Science Research Center, formation of the Film Indépendent group, and performative and expanded film works such as Screen Play (1963), A Dance Party in the Kingdom of Lilliput (1964) and Dead Movie (1964). He first went to the US in 1966 as a fellow of the Harvard University International Seminar in Boston, sponsored by the Asia Foundation, Tokyo. After his early work Love (1962)—soundtracked by Yoko Ono—was praised by Jonas Mekas and caused a stir in the American underground, Iimura relocated to New York where he would find several long-term collaborators, including composer Alvin Lucier. Living between Tokyo and New York for much of his career, he is remembered as a pioneer of exchange between the two cities' experimental film scenes and one of the most recognized Japanese practitioners of early video experimentation in the Anglophone world. Iimura’s works often interrogate the relation between word and image, and explore semiotic processes of difference and recognition.

Kenji Kanesaka (1934-1999) was a filmmaker, photographer and founding member of Film Indépendent and the Japan Filmmakers' Coop. He first came to the US in 1961 to attend the Harvard International Seminar on Culture; and again as a Fulbright Scholar at Northwestern University's film department from 1964-65.

During his time in the US, Kanesaka photographed countercultural movements, capturing hippies, members of the Black Panther Party, and individuals like Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg, which he later brought together for his photobook I Shoot America (1978). In 1966, he was commissioned by producer Marv Gold to direct Super Up, a film exploring structures of race and class inequality through advertising posters in Chicago. His 1967 film Hopscotch, partially shot in the US, formed the basis of a multimedia performance at the Sogetsu Art Center featuring Yasunao Tone, Nobuhiko Obayashi, Rikurō Miyai, Yosuke Yamashita, and Jiro Takamatsu. His publications include Underground Generation (1968), Underground America (1967), Our America (1976), Capturing America (1978) and others.

Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015) was an avant-garde artist whose works spanned video, sculpture, performance, and text, as a pioneer of video art.

Beginning her career in Japan, Kubota moved to New York in 1964 along with fellow artist Mieko Shiomi, due to her belief that her work was not receiving proper attention in Japan and will not improve in the future. Having seen a 1962 performance by John Cage in Tokyo and becoming acquainted with Yoko Ono, she began to correspond with George Maciunas while still in Japan, and in New York became a key organizer for the Fluxus movement, dubbed by Maciunas as its “Vice Chairman.” Kubota became a fixture of the Fluxus community, participated in various Fluxus events including her infamous Vagina Painting (1965) and produced her own Fluxus objects. Kubota also became a member of experimental music group Sonic Arts Union.

In the early 1970s, Kubota began exploring video as a new media, and her practice bore video sculpture, which unified video and three-dimensional sculptural forms. Her first experiments with a video camera were manipulated close-up self-portraits, made using the newly invented Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer while she, Paik, and artist Shuya Abe were teaching art CalArts in 1970-71. Her relationship with Nam June Paik developed into a marriage in 1977, and was married for thirty-years. Her major video sculpture series includes Duchampiana, and body of works referencing Japanese spiritual traditions of nature and landscape. In parallel, she evolved her autobiographical series of single-channel pieces entitled Broken Diary. 

Kubota also acted as a go-between, reporting on the underground art scene for Japanese periodicals such as Bijutsu Techo, and curating exhibitions facilitating artistic exchange, such as the 1974 exhibition Tokyo-New York Video Express in Tokyo, a collaboration with Video Hiroba. ​​In 1974 Kubota founded the video program at Anthology Film Archives at the request of Jonas Mekas, and from 1974 to 1982 served as its first Video Curator, and was instrumental in showcasing emerging video art. 

Kubota’s practice often touched on aspects of identity, subjectivity, and social relations in American life. From 1972-3, she formed the coalition Red, White, Yellow & Black, composed of artists of four different racial identities, along with Mary Lucier, Cecilia Sandoval, and Charlotte Warren. In 1973 Kubota lived for a month with a Navajo family (that of Cecilia Sandoval) in Chinle, Arizona, where she ​​discovered “video’s paradoxical quality as both a distancing device and tool for self-examination,” and made the work Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky.
https://www.shigekokubotavideoartfoundation.org/

Mary Lucier (b. 1944, Ohio) is an American artist. She was a member of the Sonic Arts Union from the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s along with her then-husband Alvin Lucier, and created visual artworks that accompanied their sound performances. Lucier was an important collaborator of fellow video artist Shigeko Kubota, with whom, along with Cecilia Sandoval and Charlotte Warren, she co-founded the feminist collective Red, White, Yellow & Black. Together with Alvin Lucier, Takahiko Iimura, and Akiko Iimura, Lucier was a member of The Sparks who staged at least one iteration of Shelter 9999. She maintains dual residences in New York City and Sullivan County, NY where she has established a studio for video art. Her work is currently represented by Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York, NY.
https://www.marylucier.net/

The career of Ko Nakajima (b. 1941, Kumamoto) has been characterized by both a perennial interest in integrating new technologies and a desire to explore human intersections with nature. Since the 1960s, he has pioneered a range of image-making techniques both in Japan and abroad, including direct animation, video, experimental projectors, and computer graphics. 

In 1971, Nakajima founded the collective Video Earth with his students at the Tokyo College of Photography, an organization with global aspirations that aimed to democratize the new medium of video by putting on workshops and exploring the potential of community access television. Nakajima also invented two image-processing devices, the Animaker and the Aniputer, with which he toured around the US and Canada hosting demos and workshops. As a result, they were acquired and taken up by a younger generation of video artists.

Nakajima also traveled to North America in 1967 to visit Expo '67 in Montreal—an event which left a deep impression on him—then to New York. There, he encountered innovations in image-making and projection technology that would influence his later works, experiments and perspectives on intermedia practices.

Masanori Ōe (b. 1942) was active as a filmmaker during the 1960s and '70s, and spent the years 1965-68 in New York. There he worked and resided with the members of Third World Studios, from which the politically engaged filmmaking collective Newsreel emerged in 1967. Ōe collaborated on several films under this label with Marvin Fishman, including No Game, a document of the 100,000-strong anti-Vietnam War march in Washington DC in October 1967. In the US, Ōe studied with Timothy Leary and became interested in psychedelic drugs and the lifestyle of hippies, the knowledge and ethos of which he brought back to Japan in the later '60s.

Ceasing to make films in the 1970s, Ōe turned to writing on New Age philosophy, translating texts such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and later, organic farming.

Yasunao Tone (b.1935, Tokyo) began his career in Tokyo as a member of Group Ongaku along with Takehisa Kosugi, Mieko Shiomi and others. His improvisational, disruptive praxis extended to performing from a van during the protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960. Tone was also involved with the Japanese performance groups Neo-Dada Organizers and Hi-Red Center, and is counted among the members of Fluxus: his graphic score Anagram for Strings was published by George Maciunas in 1963 and he later helped to found the Japanese branch of the group.

Tone moved to New York permanently in 1972, where he worked extensively with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and performed at venues including the Kitchen, the Experimental Intermedia Foundation, and P.S.1. His hybrid works for Cunningham such as Clockwork Video (1974) and Geography and Music (1979-1987), combined sound, text, video and installations integrated into events and performances.  

Morihiro Wada (1947-2007) was born in Takamatsu City, Kagawa Prefecture in 1947. He graduated from Tama Art University, Department of Painting, Oil Painting Course in 1973. He met the Canadian video artist, Michael Goldberg in 1971, and began making video works and participating in the collective Video Hiroba. In the 1970s, he produced single channel video and many conceptual works that incorporated video into his performance. His film and video work explores phenomenological structures. He continued to produce works in various ways of expression such as video, photograph, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, among others.

Jud Yalkut (1938-2013) was an experimental film and video artist from New York and a member of the countercultural media collective USCO, known for his film performances. In 1966 he began a long-term collaboration with Nam June Paik that resulted in hybrid conversations between the media of film and video, and created filmic reworkings of performances by other Fluxus members, including Charlotte Moorman. In 1967 he made a film with Yayoi Kusama entitled Kusama's Self-Obliteration, and he would also collaborate with the Japanese environmental designer Yukihisa Isobe to create Dream Reel/Floating Theater (1969), an installation in which film was projected onto a large parachute object.