the sound of watching

A week or two ago I posted an incomplete post about invigilator: Tokyo.

Well, I’m back in the UK now and sorting through all my documentation from the trip to Japan.

I’ve uploaded a few images to Flickr. There’s a slideshow here, but the pages on Flickr include captions giving more detail about each image.

but I was a bit wary about taking too many photos during the invigilation. I think it’s just a little bit too intimidating for a project that’s so much about how people react to subtleties within a space.

So, as an experiment with alternative forms of documentation, here’s a sound recording we made of the invigilation:

 
 invigilator: Tokyo [31:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

13 galleries

18/07/2007

Takashima, Sato, Yamamoto Gendai, Kodama, SCAI the Bath House, Muramatsu, Nantenshi, Yamaguchi, INAX, Humanite, Koyanagi, Natsuka, Grafica.

My feet hurt.

Yamanote days

I have now embarked on a tour of Tokyo.

My guide is a map from the back of a gallery postcard, with all the labels surgically removed.

map debris

My starting point is every station on the Yamanote railway line.

map book

I’ve been doing it for 2 days now, and I’m halfway round. I don’t know where the map will take me, but there’s always something interesting to be found at the other end…

Update: this became the Sites of Potentiality: Yamanote Line project.

Sugamo

sugamo

Known as the Grandmothers’ Harajuku, in Sugamo you can buy knicker elastic in unlimited quantities at the flea-market in the shrine grounds.

sugamo knicker elastic

However, it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, Granny Jumpers are always the same…

granny jumpers

photoroundup ii

A taxi farm:
taxis

General state of things at Ono Garou:
tap

Just liked it as an abstract collection of lines and colours:
subway map

A moderate obsession with the stairs at Ono Garou:
ono garou

ono garou

ono garou

The cast of Tonari no Totoro, shrinkwrapped:
totoro

Small cars:
cars

Making onigiri with exchange students past and present:
onigiri

Okonimiyaki and slippers:
okonimiyaki

Tower block by night:
tower

tower

Fun with shiny things:
mirror

Pedestrians in Ginza reclaim the road on a national holiday:
ginza

ginza

Empty billboard:
empty billboard

Shrine to stillborn children by night:
shrine

Ono Garou

As a follow-up to the contemporary art galleries in the industrial unit, yesterday Ami took me to several art galleries in Ginza.

ono garou

ono garou

My favourite was Ono Garou. One of the artists told us this is the oldest building in Ginza – an area associated with expensive shopping – and I can well believe it.

ono garou hallway

Formerly an apartment building, it is fairly crumbly inside and now inhabited by artists. Most of the rooms (typically about 2.5m square) are individual gallery spaces, even the old bath room!

ono garou mailboxes

We spent most time in the two basement spaces.

TYPE-TRACE, part of divvydual teased out ideas about language, authorship and production: three sets of laptops, chairs and projectors where visitors were invited to type their thoughts whilst having the process of their typing logged. The document was then played back in real time with letterforms having differing sizing depending on how long it took before the corresponding key had been pressed.

http://spinn-aker.co.jp/kobo/t-guide.htm
www.inexhale.net
www.phonethica.net
 www.tokyoartbeat.com

Next to the room bathed in the cold light from the monitors and projectors was the work of Saito Juichi. Dressed formally in suit, tie and white cotton gloves, the artist welcomed visitors at an equally formally dressed table outside his space. With soft voice and great solemnity we were then shown into what is essentially the cupboard under the stairs.

Only being able to stand upright immediately inside the door, we then had to stoop and shuffle over the rabbit pelts to view the sculpture at the far end that also provided the only lighting in the space.

Marvellous.

saito

Once outside and back at the table again, we were ushered through the process of signing our names (with a fountain pen, naturally) on visitors cards that were then put away in a lidded box.

Shortly afterwards we returned and, with Ami’s help with translation, Saito-san became the first person in Japan invited to participate in the Peer-to-Peer Sketchbooks project.

Stones

After the sumo last weekend, Tomoko and I explored a nearby shrine… in the dark!

After being startled by the resident cat who suddenly decided she wanted to be somewhere else, we found a particular stone that Tomoko had been looking for.

It has become a custom for visitors to scrape off some of the stone and keep is as a charm for good health. We obliged, but being dark it all felt strangely furtive! Also the photo isn’t very good…

shrine stone

A few days later, this was echoed across the road from Spiral.

The area is getting a bit of a face-lift and, making the most of the Japanese language’s huge number of homophones, they’ve come up with Au to play off the place name, the verb to meet and the colour blue.

In addition to the new logo (of course!) they had covered a huge area with marble chippings and strung up a load of flags across the side nearest the street. It was catching everyone’s attention and whilst not many people knew what it was about, they were all keen to grab a handful of the stones which we were told had healing properties and were invited to take away with us!

au1

”au2”

au3

au4

Spiral

After going to Kiyosumishirakawa we went to Spiral in/near Omotesando. I was really keen to see Spiral having already come across their Independent Creators Festival via Ami’s work.

spiral

Music shop, coffee shop, gift shop and Lumps and Bumps by lang/bauman in the atrium:

lumps

bumps

above

Kiyosumishirakawa

Kiyosumishirakawa

A few days ago a friend took me to see some galleries in the Kiyosumishirakawa area of downtown Tokyo.

cement factory

industrial unit

Tucked in between a cement factory and a taxi ranch, is a building that houses a dispatch warehouse, a lighting manufacturer and, oh, 3 floors of commercial galleries!

3 floors of galleries

After finding your way past the palettes to the industrially sized lift, you come out in a slightly different world of pristine white cubes! (ie the type of place you’re blatantly not going to be allowed to take any photos…)

pallettes

white cubes

There was a real mix of contemporary artists being represented: Japanese, international, emerging and more established. We even came across a Damien Hurst in one of the galleries!

entrance

Other than the complete serendipity of walking out of the lift, I think the nicest touch for me was the little reception desk just inside the entrance that just sort of pulled the whole thing together.

www.tomiokoyamagallery.com
www.shugoarts.com
www.zenshi.com
www.takaishiigallery.com
 www.hiromiyoshii.com

observatory

The thing I often find most disturbing about the city ofTokyo is that it just doesn’t seem to have any edges.

night1

night2

night3

night4

night5

Hama-Rikyu Fish Challenge

got it!

sumo

Last year we just missed out on the sumo tournament in Nagoya (I think), but yesterday we were lucky enough to wander over to the sumo district and get some of the remaining tickets.

I’m not going to pretend to know much about the sport, but it was very entertaining and impressive.

stadium

sumo bout

sumo bout

sumo bout

They’re all trying to be a little bit higher up in the rankings for when the next tournament comes around.

banzuke

A few champions will become immortalised in bronze…

sumo statue

… or in scarily realistic plastic effigies.

sumo dolls

Hama-Rikyu Gardens

After a few false starts that actually worked out rather well, we made it to the Hama-Rikyu Gardens: a shogun family garden/duck hunting bonanza type place in the past, and now something of an oasis sandwiched between the skyscrapers and the port.

[as ever you can click on each image for a larger version]

hama rikyu

We ate good food, fed the cat, snoozed, mingled with the wildlife…

dragonfly

and joined the heads bobbing among the flowers.

hats

My botanical knowledge is somewhat lacking, but I’m going to call these chrysanthemums until somebody corrects me.

flower

The chrysanthemums were a fabulous orange.

Also, I think I found what is probably my new most favouritist building. Here are a few photos that don’t even come close to showing why!

windows

building

massage chairs at Big Camera

I’m sure every one of these people was merely carefully considering the options for a future purchase…

massage chairs

le weekend

The weekend just gone was a long one thanks to the annual holiday Respect for the Aged Day on Monday.

All three days were great: various people taking me to Hama-Rikyu Gardens, Nihon Minka En and to the sumo tournament. Photos to follow shortly and many thanks to all involved for the little extras that made each day a little bit more special than just joining ranks with the other tourists.

izakaya and…

Last night a friend took me to an izakaya.

The amazingly delicious food,

counter

subdued lighting,

table

and restrained atmosphere,

washing up

were followed by a quick game of pachinko:

pachinko

Welcome to Japan.

photoroundup

A Geidai door; an extraordinarily large baby (how large? this large); a section of roof at Charles de Gaul airport; some small cherry-flavoured desserts that looked really unappetising, not least because they’d probably been sitting around in this claw machine in a 50p shop for a long, long time; the moon, a plane and a hotel; a street scene in rainy Machida; novelty architecture in Ueno; stools in the painting department of Geidai; emerging from Ueno park into the bright lights of the city…

geidai

Yesterday I went to the festival of Tokyo University of Music and Arts (Geidai) in Ueno.
http://www.geidai.ac.jp/english/index.html

Part open day:

…part exhibition:

… part car boot sale:

…and part barbeque and music festival:

a good time was had by all!

The students kept asking me how it compared to festivals in the UK, and I had to say that I’d never seen anything like this in the UK. But then maybe my experiences in Bournville aren’t particularly representative.

I tried asking them what the festival was for and who came etc etc. It seems that many students from all the other Tokyo art universities come to these things, as well as families of Geidai students. In addition to showing and selling some of their work, each department has its own batch of beer and food stalls as well as two or three student bands playing throughout the evening. After which, apparently it is traditional for the students to decide to go for a swim in the pond of the nearby park.

Now that part at least sounds familiar!

orientation

I’m in a different part of Sagamiono compared to where I was last year so this morning I went for a short walk to see what’s what.

I can now confirm that I live above a shop called Dog Style [ed:it’s a pet shop]; next to a fire station (calm down Cath!); and just around the corner from the Co-op (you still get carved up by trolleys in the aisles, but people will bow and apologise profusely whilst they’re doing it!)

Oh, and I’m not sure where it’s coming from, but somewhere close by plays the Westminster chimes over a loud speaker at noon each day. If I remember correctly, this is also what they use at Joshibi University to signal the start and finish of lunch, so I wonder if I’m going to start developing some sort of Pavlovian response to it…

arrived

Not much in the way of excitement between Southampton and Narita, although I did spill my orange juice halfway over the Urals and had to spend the rest of the flight sat on a plastic bag. Classy.

We decided to dive into an Internet cafe on our way back from the supermarket, so I’m currently on a plush black leather(ish) sofa in a small booth amongst many in what seems to be something of a veritable manga emporium. Whilst in the supermarket we met two of the Joshibi students who came to Brum last February and the 2 Finnish exchange students who are just starting their 4 week stint at Joshibi and, it seems, could well have been on the same flight as me this morning!

I don’t didn’t have any of the camera cables with me to upload photos (although I do have 5kg of rice and some fish-cake type things on the sofa next to me) so possibly photos to get added to this at a later stage but I’ve now uploaded a couple of photos.

ami and the shopping

booooths