Screens have the unlikely duel function of both concealing and revealing. According to Steven Connor, “A screen filters; it is a permeable membrane, not a locked door. Screens cover and conceal: but in presenting a secondary or fictitious surface, they also partially disclose.”
Entwining themselves in the history of images and cinema, the Yokohama-based sister/brother duo SHIMURABROS. are concerned with extending the screen beyond its limitations of two-dimensionality. Probing surfaces with projected light that is given the appearance of mass, their X-ray Train invites audiences to navigate their way around a moving image and experience it in an entirely new way, as a sculptural form.
One major invention in the history of moving images that SHIMURABROS. are referencing here is chronophotography (from the Greek chronos and photography, ‘pictures of time’), an important precursor to cinematography. The French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey is attributed with inventing the first form of sequence photography that involved the release of a shutter at regular intervals, furthering his studies of movement – particularly that of human bodies and animals.
In 1872 a Californian businessman and racehorse owner hired the photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle the question of whether all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground at the same time during gallop. When Muybridge came up with a single image showing a racehorse airborne in the midst of a gallop, it was an instance of photography being used to render visible what was previously invisible. Nobody before this had seen a horse thus suspended in the air and the image became a new model for equestrian painters: more than a tool for recording what we saw, the camera was coming to be treated as a means for capturing what we couldn’t perceive with the naked eye.
According to popular legend, in 1895 a group of Parisians were struck by panic during the world’s first film screening – the Lumière brothers L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat (‘The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station’) – when they believed a steam locomotive on the screen was actually coming right at them. Unaccustomed to the amazingly realistic illusions created by motion pictures, they were suitably incredulous and terrified.
Meanwhile that same year the German physicist William Roentgens would stumble upon his breakthrough discovery of the X-ray, and publish his paper Über eine neue Art von Strahlen, outlining the New Kind Of Ray that would allow us to see through surfaces. A hundred and fifteen years down the track (so to speak) SHIMURABROS. have traced these two instances with their X-ray Train, made from medical CT scans and special liquid crystal film. With a series of computer-controlled screens giving the illusion of a locomotive engine in transit, the work continues the exploration of these essential questions about the relationship between image and reality.
Yuka and Kentaro Shimura received the Excellence prize at the 13th Japan Media Arts Festival 2009 and their work Sekilala is currently on show at PICA in Perth. Their solo exhibition Film Without Film has just opened at Taka Ishii Gallery in Kyoto, and they will be travelling to Moscow for another exhibition before stopping in Sydney and Melbourne for our Big In Japan! events this November, marking the first time their X-ray Train has been shown in Australia.