Gestalt (部屋/形態, 1999)

Gestalt
n.  [PSYCHOLOGY] an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts; origin 1920s: from the German Gestalt, literally ‘form, shape’

Gestalt(Heya/Keitai, 1999) is an early work by the installation artist Takashi Ishida(石田高志, b. 1972).  I first saw it when I acquired Image Forum’s Thinking and Drawing DVD at a screening of Tokyo Loop in early 2007.  Ishida’s explorations of shape and form through animated installations have become increasingly sophisticated and bold over the years, yet somehow Gestalt is the work that has made the biggest impression on my subconscious mind.  On sunny days like today, when I see patterns on my wall created by the sunlight coming into contact with the with the textures of the wall and the patterns of grain on surfaces of wood, I imagine Ishida’s paint strokes transforming the walls of this unremarkable room into something quite magical.

The film opens with a plain wood frame on a non-descript wall.  A black line paints itself around the frame, then bursts free of the confines of the picture frame to create dramatic patterns of black lines against the white background.   Black lines paint over white, white lines paint over black, and so on until the bold white on black title card appears reading “部屋/形態  gestalt”

部屋= heya = room

形態  = keitai= form/shape

Ishida introduces us to the room with a shot of part of the old window flecked with paint and years of grime, but still allowing some amber light into the room.  He then shows us the rough surface of the wall, focusing in on it bit by bit, the rest of the room left unfocused.  The camera is then placed with the window on screen right and the wall that will be the central “canvas” for the animation on screen left.

There are several different camera set ups in this 7 minute animation.  Each one explores shape and form through a pattern of colouring dark on light, filling in space and emptying it again.  The artist reprises the shape of the window, his signature swirling lines, and plays with the flickering light, exploring all the possibilities this deceptively simple space offers the creative mind.  Gestalt was shot over the course of one year in a Tokyo dormitory.  Each day, Ishida would paint on the wall and photograph it using the available light from the window.  The flowing lines and play of geometric patterns result in a contemplative piece that is stylistically reminiscent of early experiments with music and animation by artists like Norman McLaren and Oskar Fischinger.

At one point, a lone sphere traverses the wall, recalling the classic work Spheres (Norman McLaren/ René Jodoin, 1969), which was composed to accompany Glenn Gould playing Bach. J.S. Bach is also a favourite of Ishida, whose later work The Art of the Fugue (2001) was commissioned by the Aichi Culture Center to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of Bach’s passing.  The soundtrack of Gestalt features one of Bach’s Great Eighteen Choale Preludes, the hauntingly ethereal BWV 659 “Nun, komm’ der Heiden Heiland” (Come now, Saviour of the heathen) performed on an organ.  

Gestaltcan be seen on Thinking and Drawing:

Thinking and Drawing

Steps (Tochka, 2010)

The animation team Tochka (Takeshi Nagata and Kazue Monno) are famous for their PiKA PiKA or “lightning doodle” animation technique. In the course of their career they have actually practiced a wide range of stop motion animation techniques. In my review of their CALF DVD Tochka Works 2001-2010, I pointed out that the “Jumping” section of their film PiKA PiKA in Yamagata (2008) uses a pixilation technique similar to that used in Norman McLaren’s Neighbours (1952). It was with great delight that I discovered during the CALF Animation Special at Nippon Connection that Tochka was continuing to experiment with this technique.

Pixilation, a term attributed to NFB animator Grant Munro, is a technique in which live actors are animated frame-by-frame together with inanimate objects. Takeshi Nagata told me that for Steps (2010), they took their inspiration from the Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra film A Chairy Tale (1957) in which Jutra has an encounter with a chair that refuses to be sat upon.

Jutra and the chair in a stand off in A Chairy Tale

a similar stand off in Steps

In Steps, we are presented with an empty room with a checkerboard floor pattern and a lone bulb hanging from a cord on the ceiling. Slabs in the formation of steps slide out of the walls, through the room, and back out the opposite wall. The opening sequence ends with the door opening, the steps sliding in with PiKA PiKA lights spelling out the title in the air and a PiKA PiKA stick figure running through the frame.

A salaryman sleeping in his pajamas slides in through the open door and is soon resting on a bed of slabs, with his clothes on a rack nearby. The PiKA PiKA stick figure jumps on his face and soon the man and the stick figure are engaged in a slap stick routine in which the man’s clothes slide out of his reach, and the stick figure taunts him and they fight with each other.

In the next scene, the man returns, as if from work, into the empty room. The PiKA PiKA stick figure slides in slabs and shapes them into steps that the man climbs until he has to duck his head because he is too close to the ceiling. The stick figure first tries to knock him down, then shoves the man – still atop a pile of slabs – out the door.

Tochka’s Steps not only borrows the A Chairy Tale’s pixilation technique but also matches it in its playfulness and innovative design. There are some key differences between the films. In A Chairy Tale, the chair itself was given human attributes: provoking Jutra then later trying to win his affection back again. In Steps, the interplay is between the actor and an animated human stick figure drawn in the air with light. The inanimate objects such as the coat rack and the steps do not acquire any human attributes. Instead, it is suggested that their movement is manipulated by the playful, scalawag PiKA PiKA figure.

Ghostly form of an animator briefly visible

Another big difference is that in A Chairy Tale, the way in which the chair has been animated remains invisible to the naked eye. No matter how much the viewer strains to see if there are strings attached to the chair, the illusion of movement is so complete that it really does appear as if the chair has indeed come to life and is moving of its own volition.

Not so in Steps, where the careful spectator can see the ghostly black figures of the animators in some of the frames. This is characteristic of the PiKA PiKA films, which seek to demystify the art of stop motion animation. It’s a postmodern twist on the NFB style pixilation in which it is not just about the illusion of movement but about our awareness of the hand of the animator(s) in the making of a stop motion film.

This added dimension would have been much clearer in the original presentation of the film which was as part of a video installation.  Exhibition visitors would have watched the film standing in the same room and looking through peep holes on the wall.  See Tochka's Flickr stream to get an idea of the exhibition space at Aichi Triennale 2010.

A brilliant little film, which makes me excited to see what new projects Tochka have up their sleeves. To learn more about Tochka and their PiKA PiKA workshops read about my observations of their Nippon Connection workshop in Frankfurt. The Tochka Works 2001-2010 DVD can be purchased from CALF or within Europe via BAA.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Nippon Connection 2011

Tochka Works 2001-2010

The collaborative art team Tochka (トーチカ) has had a distinctive online presence for many years now.  Their creative method of animating with light has inspired many artists around the world to make their own lightning doodles from Lichtfaktor here in Germany to the artists behind the 2007 Sprint commercial. Tochka’s short videos have been shared extensively on the internet, but CALF’s second volume in their DVD series Japanese Independent Animators gives fans a sense of the history of the PiKA PiKA Lightning Doodle movement.  Like Maya Yonesho's Daumenreise and Rinpa Eishidan's videos, Tochka's PiKA PiKA  films belong to the tradition of collaborative art.

Takeshi Nagata and Kazue Monno, the creative duo that make up Tochka – came up with their lightning doodle animation method in 2005 and christened it PiKA PiKA. The Japanese language is replete with evocative onomatopoeias – words whose sound suggests their meaning  – like "buzz buzz" or "drip drop" in English.  “Pika pika” (ピカピカ), as any fan of Pikachu from Pokemon can tell you, is associated with lightning or flashes of light.

The seemingly magical images of people drawing with coloured lights is actually fairly easy for the amateur animator to achieve. In fact, Tochka came up with the method as a way of teaching the principles of stop motion animation to a workshop that ranged in ages from 3 to 60. As the accompanying booklet explains, one only needs a camera with long exposure capabilities, a flashlight, and a nice black background. While the shutter is open, the “animators” draw shapes repetitively in the air with their flashlights. When the images are played back consecutively at normal speed, the light animation comes to life.

The use of drawing with light in photography is believed to have originated with the avant-garde artist Man Ray in 1935 when he used his pen light to create the self portrait Space Writings (check out the interactive material accessing this work at The Smithsonian). Another famous practitioner of light animation in photography was Pablo Picasso, as you can see in his collaborative photographs with Gjon Mili (examples here and here).

Tochka has taken the artistic concept of photographing points of light at a low shutter speed and married it to contemporary technologies and to their political beliefs in the democratization of art and the use of art to bring people of all walks of life together in a harmonious activity. Their films are not only animations, but also a documentation of their travels around the world where they collaborate with school children, artists at festivals, and even just people they meet while walking the streets of neighbourhoods from Indonesia to Canada. They also use music by local artists on the soundtracks which adds to each film’s flavour as a document of a particular place and time.  This interactivity between filmmakers, musicians, participants, and viewers is truly unique.

Their marriage of their light doodles with music reminded me of Norman McLaren’s imaginative film Boogie-Doodle (1941). A further reminder of McLaren came while I was viewing the “Jumping” section of their PiKA PiKA in Yamagata (2008) video. McLaren’s Oscar-winning film Neighbours (1952) used an animation technique which Grant Munro coined pixilation where people are essentially transformed into stop motion puppets. The Jumping sequence in PiKA PiKA in Yamagata takes the Jumping sequence from Neighbours and multiplies it by more than a dozen as you can see in these screencaps:

McLaren's Neighbours (1952)

PiKA PiKA in Yamagata (2008)

Tochka’s PiKA PiKA films are fun to watch and look as though they were fun to make by the participants. It’s like an animated form of mural-painting or graffiti art.  This was suggested to me by their compilation film PiKA PiKA (2007) which has scenes where both graffiti and lightning doodles are being created simultaneously.

The behind-the-scenes footage of their shoots in the Osaka neighbourhood of Naniwa-ku earlier this year demonstrates how PiKA PiKA can be used in a positive way to document the people and places of a neighbourhood. While in their early films the faces of the “animators” with the lights were obscured, in this footage they light the faces of the local people they encounter during the night shoots while they frame them with lightning doodles. This documentary footage is particularly magical for the way that it shows the transformation of the participants from portrait subjects to active participants. The delight on their faces to see the results of the animation process played back to them from a laptop is truly a joy to behold.

Another element of Tochka’s work that I enjoy is their foregrounding of the process of animation and the tools they use to achieve it. This seems to belong to their desire to share art, rather than simply being privileged practitioners of it. The opening sequences of their films often document the people and the process they used to make the film. For example, The Lovely Memories (2009) is a documentary of an artistic workshop, an animation, and a loving tribute to Lomography cameras (famed for their colourful, soft focus images) all rolled into one (read an interview with Tochka about shooting with the Diana F+ and Instant Back).

This DVD is by no means a complete works of Tochka who have done a wide range of stop motion films over the years for both commercial and artistic purposes. The DVD’s main focus is the PiKA PiKA output since 2005. However, in the special features section of the DVD they do include one of their early stop motion animations Build (2001) which screened on a massive wall in Kobe to commemorate the earthquake – it is a disturbing and fascinating film which playfully references early computer games like Pong and Tetris. 

Other extras include a slideshow of 100 PiKA PiKA stills and a behind-the-scenes featurette of a PiKA PiKA workshop at Suito Osaka (2009,. There is also a short snippet shot for Design Tide (2007), a long edit of PiKA PiKA in Indonesia (2008), and the trailer for PiKA PiKA in Kanazawa (2008). 

Tochka Works 2001-2010 can be purchased online at CALF. The shop is currently Japanese only but an English version is in the works. Alternatively, try contacting them via e-mail or Facebook. The DVD is bilingual Japanese – English.  To learn more about Tochka, visit their homepage.

UPDATE 13 October 2010: CALF's English language webshop is now up and running!

DVD now available in France from HEEZA

Related Posts:

 Mirai Mize Works 2003-2010

Atsushi Wada’s Day of Nose

Kei Oyama’s Hand Soap

Maya Yonesho Profile
Rinpa Eshidan

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Tabaimo at Moderna Museet

Earlier this year (31 Jan – 19 April), installations by Tabaimo (束芋) were featured at the Moderna Museet on Skeppsholmen Island in central Stockholm, Sweden. The exhibit was curated by Lena Essling.

The event included a screening on February 5th of films by Keiichi Tanaami and Shuji Terayama that were chosen by Tabaimo. A summary of the event can be found on the Moderna Museet’s website here. They also posted a video of an interview with Tabaimo about her art. Her views on animation and spectatorship are quite fascinating so I’ve provided a transcript (with some minor grammar revisions) of the English subtitles below.

In this interview with Ulf Eriksson, Tabaimo discusses in depth the three installations used in the exhibition: public conVENience (her contribution to Tokyo Loop which she has transformed into an installation/2006), dolefullhouse (2007) and midnight sea (2006/2008). Tabaimo seems to do a combination of careful planning (researching locations) and letting her art evolve as she works. The latter of which really surprised me as her films seem so meticulously planned and yet she claims to have a working method as fluid as the sea that inspires her.

Interview transcript:

By connecting [a] series of drawings, I can express things in a way [that] a single image could never convey. I was with this aspiration to achieve a greater impact [that] I embarked on animation. Viewers need to be active and participate in my installations. Even if approaching the piece creates a sense of discomfort. I create situations that make viewers feel uneasy and participate more actively.

I try to capture the images and themes that come to me while I work. Later all these images are integrated into a whole, the piece itself. Hopefully, that’s what creates magic. . . that images evolve that I hadn’t even pictured beforehand. That’s my creative process: not being able to predict the outcome. Hopefully, the results will even surprise me.


[re: public conVENience, 2006]

The interesting thing about public lavatories [is] how your privacy is maintained only by thin walls between the stalls. That’s why I chose the setting, in spite of its dark connotations. During the research phase, I videotaped public toilets and collected lots of footage from typical lavatory environments in order to create this piece. I let the lavatory be a stage. Then I thought about what might happen, such as a door swinging open. . . someone fixing their hair, or washing their hands. Then I created characters to populate the space. Then I leave them on their own. I have no idea what they will do. I simply follow their leads.

A public lavatory at a park is generally something you want to avoid. they aren’t usually very clean. Even though they are meant for public use, they are often fairly sleazy. Lots of things happen in lavatories. People like to gossip there. But there are also men who like to take pictures of women in secret. Most anything can happen. Crimes can be committed, while extremely commonplace activities also take place [there].

There is an interesting similarity between public lavatories and the internet. People have always scribbled things on the walls of the stalls. Nowadays people post similar messages on internet sites and bulletin boards. In both forums, generally anonymous authors direct their messages to a faceless crowd. The same anonymity exists. So the lavatory is a metaphor for this kind of internet communication.


[re: dolefullhouse, 2007]

In “dolefullhouse” it’s important to be observant. The question of whose hands are involved is very important. “Dolefullhouse” resembles a Western-style dollhouse. But you can sense that another, real, house encompasses this ideal miniature. A world exists on the outside. I want to create layers of worlds. The main thing in this piece is how viewers see themselves in relation to what’s going on. Could it be their own hands moving the furniture? Or do they identify with the dolls inhabiting the house? Or do they view the house from above, as pure spectators?

In this piece, it’s important which world you would choose to inhabit. You will also experience the piece differently depending on where you are in the room. I don’t determine who’s who or who does what. I want people to have a regular-sized dollhouse in mind when they look at the large dollhouse projected in front of them. That will cause different sensations depending on how close they are to “dolefullhouse”.


[re: midnight sea, 2006/2008]

This piece is called “midnight sea.” The dark sea at midnight both frightens and fascinates me. It’s like the very darkness of the water is pulling me under. I’m not entirely sure what creatures are moving under the surface, but I tried to create the sense of hairs passing inside the body. I tried to follow the movement of these hairs under the skin. The Japanese word for wave also means wrinkle, and the shifting surface is like the skin of an elderly person. Under the surface you can see things, they’re actually organs or bones. I wanted to create a sense of a foreign object moving inside a body.

This is something very abstract that I don’t really understand myself. As I mentioned earlier, about the way I like to work, I want to create something I cannot predict beforehand. “Midnight sea” is one of the pieces that represents this concept the most. The ancient tradition of a connection between the human body and water is deeply imbedded in my consciousness.

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT TABAIMO, GO TO HER OFFICIAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE REPRESENTATIVE: JAMES COHAN GALLERY. YOU CAN FIND INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS, AND NEWS ABOUT UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS THERE.

If any of my readers has attended an exhibition by Tabaimo, I would love to hear about the first hand experience either in my comments or by e-mail. I have only seen her work on video or in photographs/prints.

Tokyo Loop

Animation

Film of the Sea (海の映画, 2007)

Takashi Ishida (石田尚志, b.1972) is an abstract animation and installation artist in the vein of Norman McLaren, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, and Mary Ellen Bute. Not only is Ishida on the cutting edge of the contemporary Japanese art film and installation scene, but he has also made waves internationally with his work. He has most recently been spending a lot of time in Canada where he has done screenings of his works in Toronto at Trinity Square Video and Cinématheque Ontario. His work is currently included in a Projection Series at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal which runs until March 29th.

Aurora included Ishida’s 2007 Umi no Eiga (海の映画/Film of the Sea, mini-DV, 12 min.) in its recent DVD collection of the best works from their 2008 festival. Other artists featured on the DVD include Sophie Michael (UK), Vanessa O’Neill (USA), Chris Kennedy (USA/Canada), Samantha Rebello (UK), Lin de Mol (Netherlands), Charlotte Pryce (USA), Sara MacLean (Canada), Yeon Jeong Kim (South Korea), Philippe Gerlach (Austria), and Stefan Kushima (Austria).

Umi no Eiga was created over a period of four months at the Yokohama Museum of Art. The initially plain white room of the art gallery plays a significant role in the making of meaning in the film. A lone film projector has been placed in the room and it projects a seascape image centrally on the wall in the same position at which a painting would be hung. Then, however, Ishida blurs the boundaries between projected film and traditional art gallery space by using stop motion to create the effect of blue paint flowing out of the projected image of the sea, continuing down the wall and flooding out onto the floor of the gallery.

The film then follows a pattern of creating and erasing oppositions: negative versus positive space, inside versus outside, light versus dark, blue (or black) versus white, movement versus stasis, sound versus silence, consonance versus dissonance, and so on. The animation of the room full of swirling waves of paint, and then its erasure again mimics the perpetual flowing of the tide in and out on the beach. The result is truly mesmerizing.

The metaphor of the sea is complex in the multitude of ways in which it can be interpreted. The sea is a symbol of constancy, with the waves rolling in and back out again, and yet the sea is also ever-changing as the waves never form themselves in the same pattern twice. Ishida’s sea can be seen as a metaphor for Ishida’s stop motion art itself which can never be reproduced in exactly the same fashion. The process of making the film also resulted in multiple ways of ‘seeing’ or experiencing the art process, including an installation version called Wall of the Sea (海の壁 -生成する庭) with three synchronized screens. On his website, Ishida describes the installation as follows:

In this installation, three different images which were shot in the same room are projected by three projectors. The one image is various retakes of the images of the sea which projected by a film projector put in a room, and another two images are the images of the drawing animations expanded to the room. Originally, the image which was made by projecting from the projector in the rectangle is "the right Film", but, in this work, images spread from the rectangle to the whole of the room by a large quantity of paint. Occasionally the screen fell down and was flooded and sank in a room. This work is an experiment to expand the image from the structure of the film. Then through those variations of many results, this work will try to let audiences regard "what is the image".

Ishida seems particularly concerned with the fluidity shape, surfaces, frames, and boundaries in his oeuvre. Shapes and surfaces are there to be manipulated, while frames and boundaries are meant to be crossed. In particular, Ishida blurs the boundaries between genres with his work using elements from film, painting, performance, and sculpture. Keep an eye on Ishida's news updates here to see if his work might soon be featuring at a gallery, cinématheque, or festival near you.

Thinking and Drawing

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009

Takashi Ishida and Yuki Kawamura Exhibition

Artists Takashi Ishida (石田高志) and Yuki Kawamura （河村勇樹）are being featured as part of a Projection Series at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal from January 14th until March 15th. The Project Series seeks to feature artists who represent a wide variety of aesthetic and cultural backgrounds including video artists, photographers, playwrights, choreographers and composers. The series explores the poetic relationship these diverse artists have with images projected onto a large screen. The artists all have in common the fact that they all live outside the counties in which they were born: Mariana Vassileva was born in Bulgaria but has lived in Berlin)since 1991, Kelly Richardson is a Canadian living in England, Yuki Kawamura has been living in Paris for a number of years and Takashi Ishida is currently based in Toronto.

Here are the bios of Ishida and Kawamura excerpted from the museum's website:

Takashi Ishida and Yuki Kawamura were both born in Japan, Kawamura in Kyoto in 1979 and Ishida in Tokyo in 1972. Both steeped in Japanese culture, they each nevertheless left home to pursue their commitment to art in another country. Ishida now lives and works in Toronto; Kawamura chose to complete his studies at the École supérieure des Études cinématographiques in Paris, where he still lives.

Takashi Ishida began to paint at the age of fourteen, and his originality and artistic integrity were recognized at once. In 1995 he began to make films. He made his name with Gestalt, a 16-mm film shot in 1999 which he created by taking image-by-image photographs of his own paintings. He also used the traditional Japanese roller for painting, a method that enabled him to analyze the time required for the image. In 2001, he shot the 19-minute film

Art of Fugue with the idea of transforming sound into image. Art of Fugue reveals his entirely personal way of understanding and analyzing music. Takashi Ishida has also been presenting live painting performances since 2001.

After studying French at the Kyoto University of Languages, Yuki Kawamura continued his studies in film in Paris. A visual artist and filmmaker, Kawamura also creates performance art and is involved in the electronic music scene. Since 2005, while continuing to make numerous videos, he has produced three short films that demonstrate his interest in stories and in narrative film in general. His videos since then have become spaces of pure creation. Kawamura composes fleeting, floating images that mingle nature and dreams, elusive thoughts and poetry.

Takashi Ishida and Yuki Kawamura
January 14 to March 15, 2009
Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal,
Beverley Webster Rolph Hall (lower level)
map
185 rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Montréal (514) 847-6226

Furo

I made a great find on Youtube this week. In March 2006, Japanese artist Tabaimo joined forces with choreographer Ohad Naharin and the Batshava Dance Company to put on a dance-video installation at the Jewish Theatre in Stockholm. Tabaimo employed parts of her earlier animation Parts of a Japanese Bathhouse and projected them on three screens and the dancers interact with the video art.

I have been fascinated by Tabaimo for some time now. Her art is influenced by the style and colours of traditional Nihonga artists like Hokusai. Tabaimo takes a particularly interesting critical view of public and private spaces in Japan such as kitchens, public baths and restrooms. I finally got a hold of the DVD of Image Forum's Tokyo Loop and I hope to review Tabaimo's film Public Convenience soon.

To learn more about Tokyo Loop, read this article at PingMag, a terrific bilingual online design magazine.

Click here for press information for the performance shown in the Youtube video.

Tokyo Loop

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2007