Ideas that have broken free from “the suffocating historical dominance of conservative utility”. That was how Kenji Kawakami described his Chindōgu movement of useless consumer products.
Maywa Denki operate on a slightly different principle of nonsense machine instrumentation. The director Nobumichi Tosa might be continuing from where Jean Tinguely’s metamechanics or Reuben Goldberg and Heath Robinson’s superfluous machinery left off, but his language is very much grounded in Japan’s hyper-consumerist culture. Dressed in the blue suit uniforms of Japanese electric store workers, he refers to Maywa Denki’s live performances as ‘product demonstrations’ and holds Nonsense Idea Conceiving Workshops.
Posted by amelia groom 8:12 AM, August 23rd, 2010 1 comment
Makes perfect sense to me! Thanks for a great post.
Comment by James — August 26, 2010 @ 7:36 pm