Themes - Technology
The 1960s saw rapid changes in the mediascapes of both the US and Japan, especially through the rise of home televisions and domestic consumer-focused mass market periodicals at the height of their respective Cold War era economic booms. World’s Fairs, including Montreal’s Expo 67 and Osaka’s Expo ’70, featured interactive communications media and immersive moving image architectures (including the first IMAX) that tied in to the boom in media theory exemplified by the mass media popularity of Marshall McLuhan. This popular interest in media theories also coincided with the emergence of consumer video cameras, Moog synthesizers, and other technologies that allowed individuals without access to large-scale commercial studios to manipulate sound and image in new and unexpected ways.
In response to the barrage of mass media forms as well as the limitations of conventional uses for these new technologies, many artists in Japan and North America began experimenting with non-conventional ways of employing technology in service of democratic and counterculture ends. They created local video exchange networks to oppose the unidirectional feed of broadcast media, hacked audio synthesizers to manipulate electronic video feed, drew directly on film acetate, and designed novel projection technologies as methods to interrogate the newly-immersive mediascapes of the US and Japanese Cold War era.
Video Exchange
DIY Technology
Intermedia Events
Processes of exchange were essential to the development of video. Both knowledge and equipment were shared between video practitioners in Japan and the US through events such as Video Communication: Do-It-Yourself-Kit at the Sony Building, Video Week: Open Retina Grab Your Image at the American Center, Tokyo, and Tokyo-New York Video Express, organized by Shigeko Kubota for Video Hiroba in Tenjō Sajiki’s basement theater. Video also facilitated exchange between individuals and groups: global exchanges of video letters were organized by Mits Kataoka and Hakudō Kobayashi, and the work of Video Hiroba in Japan and DCTV in New York amplified the voices of marginalized communities.
Head of the Dickson Video Lab at UCLA, Mits Kataoka organized and supported early experiments with video technology, including the work of individual video artists as well as exchanges of "video letters" between schoolchildren within the US and internationally. He was described by Nam June Paik as “a really interesting man…[who] designs everything from Cable TVs to the latest Kawai piano model.” Hakudō Kobayashi cites him as central to his own understanding of the potentials of the video letter, and Nam June Paik writes of the impact of three experimental lectures Kataoka invited him to give using video telephones to communicate from coast to coast of the US in 1979.
Michael Goldberg had begun experimenting with the possibilities of video around 1970 with multi-media communications experiments for the Franco-Manitoban Society’s Ralleye ‘70, and in collaboration with Image Bank he produced the first iteration of the Video Exchange Directory—a list of addresses to facilitate exchanges of video tapes via international mail networks—in 1971. In producing that catalogue, he began to wonder who in Japan might need to be included in the network, so he traveled to Japan in the fall of 1971 on a Canada Council grant. While Yamaguchi and Nakaya did much of the recruiting and scheduling of potential collaborators for their 1972 exhibition-cum-workshop Video Communication: Do-It-Yourself-Kit, Goldberg helped facilitate artists’ experiments with video technologies in collaboration with Sony’s technicians, essentially introducing many Japanese artists to video’s potentials.
Japan's earliest video collective, Video Hiroba, saw video as an instrument for social change. In their 1973 project Study of Participation Methods for New and Current Residents in Urban Development Planning, they collaborated with the city of Yokohama. Their experiments with using video technology to collect and circulate citizens' opinions on civic issues resulted in a previously unrecognized expression of the community’s underlying dissensus. .
In the 1970s and 1980s, artists and technicians began to explore the outer reaches of what could be done with emerging electronic and moving image technologies. One of Ko Nakajima’s early DIY inventions was a “projector” made out of a glass disk that held water and colored oil inside. He presented one version, which included a fish floating in the disk, projected onto the wall “guerrilla” style (without seeking permission) during the Merce Cunningham company’s dress rehearsal at the Sogetsu Art Center. Nakajima continued to explore this format of oil/water in glass tubes in his Shikotsuki (bone machine) projector. Experiments with image-processing in video began in the late 1960s with Eric Siegel’s Process Chrominance Synthesizer (1968) and the popular and much-adapted Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer, first completed by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe in 1970. The Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer debuted with Video Commune: The Beatles from Beginning to End on WGBX 44 and contributed to Paik's intermedia video-film collaborations with Jud Yalkut. Shigeko Kubota was also part of the experimentation with Shuya Abe at Cal Arts, and the synthesis technique developed then was later employed to make her Self-Portrait (1970-71). Later image-processing inventions included the Sandin Image Processor, the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, and Ko Nakajima's user-friendly Animaker and Aniputer.
From the start of Ko Nakajima’s work in moving images, he experimented with new processes and techniques. From direct drawing on film acetate in his earliest film works, to the invention of new water-and-glass projection devices, and experiments with the latest in reproductive and electronic processing technologies, his identity in the Japanese art world is linked to his tinkering and inventing. He credits much of his early inspiration for his move toward creating devices with the strong impression Montreal’s Expo 1967 left on him of the possibilities of adapting new technologies. In collaboration with Sony and JVC, Nakajima invented two image-processing devices in the early 1980s: the Animaker and the Aniputer. These were subsequently demonstrated in the US and Canada at museums, art centers, and computer-art conventions like SIGGRAPH.
Inspired by Dadaists and her participation in the early years of Fluxus, Shigeko Kubota exploited the poetic and practical potentials of reproductive media forms from photography to video to create interfaces between the personal and social realms. Her photographic and video documentation of an infamous 1968 chess game between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage was reworked into book, single-channel video, and video sculptural formats that all brought out distinct impressions of the event while invoking issues of experience and memory. She drew on the portability of the Sony Portapak with her series of video diaries, including Broken Diary: Europe on 1/2 Inch a Day (1972), and later exploited the physicality of the video monitor as she pioneered the video sculpture form.
First coined by the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in the mid-1960s, intermedia can be framed as a discourse on interactions between media or artistic disciplines. The term found its way to Japan relatively quickly after it was coined by way of Japanese artists who had traveled abroad, some of whom were involved in the international Fluxus network. Given their close affiliation with the New York-based Fluxus community, the first Japanese artists and critics to inherit the term “intermedia” most likely did so directly from Higgins. As far as we can currently ascertain, the first use of the term “intermedia” in Japanese print was in an article published in December 1966 written by Takahiko Iimura. In the article “Special Report! Seismic Rumbles from the Underground” for the Japanese film magazine Eiga Hyōron [Cinema criticism], Iimura reports on the latest works by artists Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Whiteman, and the artist group USCO, as well as his experience visiting a discotheque in San Francisco.
Cross Talk was a multi-year event series co-organized by American flutist and designer Karen Reynolds and composer Roger Reynolds, with Japanese critic Kuniharu Akiyama and composer Jōji Yuasa through the American Center—Japan to showcase contemporary music from Japan and the US in a kind of exchange. After three music-focused concerts in 1967 and 1968, the group organized a three-day festival in February 1969 entitled Cross Talk / Intermedia that presented the latest in cross-genre experiments. Sponsored by Pepsi and held in a gymnasium designed by Kenzō Tange for the 1964 Summer Olympics, the free event brought intermedia into the mainstream. Cross Talk / Intermedia brought to mind the spirit of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)’s 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering (1966) for its ambition and scope, as well as the fact that the electronic companies Sony, Pioneer, and TEAC Corporation were directly involved in the loaning and invention of equipment for the purposes of several performances. The resulting event involved a series of large scale presentations, including projections onto large inflatables in the form of Projection for Icon (Icon no tame no projection, 1969) by Toshio Matsumoto and Circles (1969) by Takahiko Iimura in collaboration with musician Alvin Lucier. In just two years, the scale of the locations in which intermedia was presented moved from the small confines of a gallery to a sports gymnasium.
Fujiko Nakaya's trademark fog sculptures, first displayed at Expo '70s Pepsi Pavilion, manipulate atmospheric elements to produce dynamic, site-specific artworks. She was also heavily involved in organizing the participation of Japanese artists in what was to have been a series of performances in the Pepsi Pavilion throughout the run of Expo ‘70. Although cancelled due to budget overruns, the remaining proposals give us a sense of the breadth of intermedia experiments circa 1970. Prior to the founding of Video Hiroba, Nakaya helped facilitate E.A.T.’s research into video and screen technologies, apparently in relation to their Automation House and Anand Projects. Nakaya also founded the Tokyo branch of E.A.T. in 1971 in preparation for the Tokyo branch of Telex Q&A, which coordinated trans-continental conversations via telex between New York, Stockholm, Ahmedabad, and Tokyo over the course of a month as part of the Moderna Museet’s Utopias and Visions 1871-1981.
