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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 November 20, 2005 03:50 AM