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November 20, 2005
Shizuoka Contents Valley Festival
Shizuoka Contents Valley Festival (SCVF) is a large creativity festival (with a very literal name) in the city of Shizuoka organized by a friend of ours, Hisami Omori, who has a gallery there called Mixed Media. The concept of the whole thing is perhaps a bit quirky to a foreign audience, as it takes as its catch phrase “Cool Shizuoka,” which also had to be incorporated into the 60 second title animation that we did for it. You can read the explanation here, and then realize that it essentially comes from the idea of Japan’s contemporary rise to a new kind of cultural superpower based on GNC, an argument that was made a few years ago now by journalist Douglas McGray. This idea has been re-appropraited in hopes of making “Shizuoka” resonate a little bit more like “Tokyo” does.
“Cool” from SCVF title / “Cool Is Fucking Cool” from a video piece of mine
There is an opening party next Friday which we helped to organize, and at which myself and Genki Ito will VJ, along with video performace team and friends DaDa KingZ, and others. Rei Harakami will headline this event, who is becoming one of the most famous electronic musicians within Japan, though I’m not sure he is known in any substantial way globally. I have only heard his recent stuff, but I did see him live in Tokyo before and it was quite good. The the rest of the music will come from labelmates of Sublime Records, which is also the home of Ken Ishii, who is at least slightly famous abroad for having that music video in 1996 done by Kouji Morimoto, famous as an animation director for Akira. This event actually doubles as the opening party for onedotzero Shizuoka, which is billed as a part of SCVF this year.
And finally... We will have an exhibition of personal work (large posters and video reel), I believe at the actual Mixed Media gallery mentioned before. Above are some small croppings from pieces I will show.
Posted by shane at 03:50 AM
November 16, 2005
Space Shower Identity
It was perhaps over a month ago now that we finished this 15 second identity for Space Shower TV, and in my opinion their logo has never looked so good. And furthermore, their station has never sounded so good (for a mere 15 seconds anyway) as we collaborated with good friend Tatsuya Yamada (Mas, Tyme.) to compose music for this piece. I’m not exactly sure when they will start using this piece on-air, and I don’t watch TV, so maybe someone would be so kind as to tell me if they see it?
Posted by shane at 02:33 AM
W+KTLab on iTMS
This happened a while ago and I’ve been meaning to post it, but almost the whole of W+KTokyoLab’s very small catalog (except for Afra, due to issues with Japan media publishing giant Asmik Ace) has been made available on the iTunes Music Store. Of course you miss out on the visuals this way, but these are the links to all of them:
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Takagi Masakatsu / Rehome
Takagi Masakatsu / Coieda
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Hifana / Fresh Push Breakin’
Hifana / Channel H
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DJ Uppercut / Pieces
Posted by shane at 01:43 AM
Resfest Tokyo
Resfest Tokyo will start this Thursday. The day I will attend is most likely Friday, to the the By Design and Cinema Electronica events, in which our video for Hifana’s Wamono is included. I think Gino and I may say a few words either before or after this show. I talked a lot about this video earlier in relation to Nagi Noda, and speaking of which, she is a featured director in the Triple Threat series.
Hifana’s Wamono
Takagi Masakatsu’s Bloomy Girls
Our video Exit/Delete First Sight which is included on Takagi Masakatsu’s album Coieda is also included in the By Design show, although I didn’t work on that one so much, and I’m not sure Takagi himself actually wants it to be associated with his name: Being the audio-viusal auteur that he is, he usually creates all his own video work himself.
Also, the Resmix Electronica program, which is basically Cinema Electronica but composed only of Japanese works, contains two other pieces on our label: Takagi Masakatsu’s Bloomy Girls (meditative, textural video oil painting), and Hifana’s Bangzai Cooking (Iron Chef spoof comedy show with Hexstatic-style editing), both of which are pieces I quite enjoy.
Posted by shane at 12:45 AM
November 15, 2005
For Consideration
Where I work and what I do is interesting. Today I came back from an out of the office company meeting in which everyone presents to everyone else all the work that they are doing, and we get a picture of how this office fits into the network globally. The highlight was John Jay’s presentation on our new Shanghai office, and a small fraction of the enourmous presentation that was done to Nike China there just a few days earlier.
Where I work and what I do is exhausting, alternatively rewarding, immensely challenging and sometimes just ridiculous. I never imagined working in such an insane way while in school, or anywhere else for that matter, and I always considered myself someone who works quite hard. With anything one pours that ammount of effort into, the questions inevitably come up: Is it worth it? and Why?
Today was no exception, and I’d say a decent amount of time I spend at work (or even away from it) is in a strange dazed state; an induced outward malaise that neccessarily has to be maintained in order to inwardly focus on projects at hand and accomplish things that need to be done by certain times. Therefore it can be surprising and unnerving to be approached by people from the outside world, as they have no insight into what’s going on inside your brain, and they don’t know that your social interaction is operating at some basic motor-skill level just to get you by.
Shouldn’t I be a machine? For this kind of existance, wouldn’t it be entirely more efficient and plausible to exist only as a cloud of thought, a collection of information and idea-crunching intelligence processes that are directly wired into the Adobe, Apple, and Macromedia suite of software programs?
Actually, I used Ben Fry’s Valence as an internal reference to some online ideas.
This is not healthy. This is not a state of mind conductive to robust friendships–this is a place that turns me more and more inward, in need of large amounts of personal recovery time for reflection and re-evaluation. And a frightening dynamic which has begun to arise in my head is the categorization of the whole of humanity into two distinct groups: agency-people, and non-agency-people. Subjectively I’d like to spend all my free time with non-agency-people, especially with people who are creative, but non-agency, to stay connected to the normal human world, and perhaps more signifcantly, to creativity existing for a purpose other than funneling into advertisment.
In practice however, this is much harder than it seems, as being an agency-person, you much consciously attempt to maintain a seperate non-agency self that can still connect to the outside world in an ordinary way, but more often than not, this self is consumed or buried too deeply to come out with immediacy. And furthermore, though I’ve heard of the significance of the support of friends and significant others, this is certainly not a mindstate in which obtaining a girlfriend is something in the realm of possibility. And even if it was, how do you connect to said non-agency person in a simple way that belies all the neouroses (for me anyway) that your existence entails?
At the moment it is worth it, though I still maintain that it’s a huge sacrifice: I am putting off a multitude of personal projects in order to do my job and that pains me every day. But what I am afraid of is sticking with it too hard and too long to come back. I am actually frightened of becoming more important, more promoted, more entrenched in what I do. Maybe I’m not sure if I really want to do it, and if I believe in it, though I think it will become harder and harder to walk away from with time. Whatever the case, I’m on our side for now.
Posted by shane at 01:29 AM