Referring to his work as ‘Unproductive Production Activity’, Tetsushi Higashino says his primary concern lies in our relationship with the insignificant. Screening at this week’s Big In Japan events in Sydney and Melbourne is his new omnibus video work featuring a box entering a castle, the artist turning himself into a futile air circulating system, and toilet paper resisting rectilinearity.

Big In Japan 2011 is happening at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney on November 15 and 16, and at 1000 Pound Bend in Melbourne on November 18 and 19. More on Tetsushi’s art here and here.

OVAR (Origin of Visual Audio Research) is a new collaborative duo formed in Tokyo earlier this year by two guest artists from the 2010 Big In Japan program – sound artist Mamoru Okuno and Kentaro Shimura of SHIMURABROS. The first work by OVAR, FCN001 ver.1-3 is being shown at Yuka Tsuruno gallery in Tokyo (as part of the Lumen・Sonus・Memoria show, which is on from this week until December 10), and as part of the video art exhibitions I curated for the 2011 Big In Japan events in Australia next week (November 15 and 16 at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney and November 18 and 19 at 1000 Pound Bend in Melbourne).

What we call motion pictures are actually, as we know, made up of many still pictures. Starting with the fact that most contemporary film achieves duration by using twenty-four frames to make a second, the artists constructed this disorienting video work from twenty-four still photographs. With a repeated sequence of stilted movements back and forth between different vantage points on the same scene, it attempts to visualise a multidimensional perception of time and duration that goes beyond the arrow of past-present-future.

The score is constructed from four tracks of sound (a field recording in the woods, a piano recording, and two digital sound files) which were switched on and off in every possible combination (2 x 2 x 2 x 2 patterns). Mamoru explains that since he and Kentaro do not believe in ‘pure random operation’, they experimented with various combinations of the audio and visual components, inserting subjectivity into the predetermined formulas by selecting patterns based on personal sensation.

The Japanese spatio-temporal concept of ma suggests a gap, opening, delay or silence. It can be understood as a demarcated in-betweenness in space or time. A room, being the space formed inside walls, is ma. A pause in music, as the gap delineated between audible notes, is also ma. The ideogram for ma (間) comprises the character for ‘gate’ or ‘door’ (門) enveloping the character of ‘sun’ (日) – in this sense it refers to the interval between things, from which light can shine through. Whether the gate is formed by objects in space or sounds in music or actions in the Noh theatre, its opening is the interval that allows the experience of ma, whereby the intangibility of light reveals itself from the nothingness framed between two tangible points.

In 1979 Arata Isozaki curated an exhibition at Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York called MA: Space-Time in Japan. Earlier that decade, the New-York-based Japanese video artist Takahiko Iimura had created several abstract films exploring ma (namely his Models series of 1972, and MA (Intervals) of 1975-77). The two would later collaborate on MA: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan-Ji (1989), a meditative video work that transfers the carefully choreographed experience of time and space at the ryōan-ji temple’s 15th century dry garden, into cinematic space-time.

The sixteen-minute film is framed at the beginning and end by fixed shots of the garden – these being the tangible brackets (the gate) within which the interval of ma will be given form. The rest is comprised entirely of slow tracking and zooming shots of the immovable stones and the negative spaces created where they aren’t. As the camera’s eye slowly and steadily scans the breadth of the rectangular garden, and penetrates its depth, we are made aware of how temporal progression relies on space and spatial progression relies on time. The mechanically standardised temporality (computer-controlled tracking and zooming) means that solid objects aren’t privileged over the space that contains them or the space that is created by them. According to Isozaki’s reading of ma in pre-modern Japan, “space was perceived as identical with the events or phenomena occurring in it; that is space was recognised only in relation to time-flow” (MA: Space-Time in Japan, exhibition catalogue).

Photographs I recently took at ryōan-ji in Kyoto:

For his video work Nightless, Yuichiro Tamura used photographs that were taken without a photographer, and compiled them into a film made without any filming. Thousands of gritty screen grabs from Google Maps Street View are accompanied by audio lifted from clips on YouTube, and out of the unauthored images unexpected stories begin to tell themselves. Yuichiro describes it as an exercise in “inserting subjectivity (aura) into non-subjective (anonymous) images”. After being shown at the Big in Japan 2010 events in Sydney and Melbourne the work went on to win the last Japan Media Arts Festival prize for excellence, and is now showing Hiroshima MOCA (until September 19). You can watch a version of it here.

Before he laughed himself to death after painting a funny old woman, Zeuxis is said to have lost a competition with his fellow painter Parrhasius to see who the greater artist was. While he unveiled a painting of grapes so lifelike that birds flew down from the sky to peck at them, Parrhasius won when he fooled Zeuxis about the very existence of his painting: he portrayed a curtain so realistically that Zeuxis tried to push it aside. Exclaiming that he himself had managed merely to deceive the birds while Parrhasius had deceived the artist, Zeuxis conceded defeat.

That was in 5BC, but images still have the capacity to outwit the eye as a critical organ. The Yokohama-based sister/brother duo Yuka and Kentaro Shimura, aka SHIMURABROS., are driven by a desire to get behind and beyond the illusory two-dimensional surfaces of images. Their recent solo show at Taka Ishii Gallery in Kyoto, Film Without Film, presented four examples from their diverse ten-year collaborative practice, including their acclaimed X-ray Train (2008) (below). With a series of computer-controlled medical CT scans and special liquid crystal film depicting a locomotive engine in transit, the work is self-consciously entwined with the history of the moving image and carries with it essential questions regarding the relationship between image and reality.

The most obvious historical reference here is of course the popular legend about the group of Parisians being struck by panic in 1895 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 the steam locomotive on the screen was actually coming right at them. Unaccustomed to the amazingly realistic illusions created by the new motion pictures, the audience perceived the image as existing in space and were suitably incredulous and terrified.

Whether or not this actually happened, it is interesting that it was also in 1895 that 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 opaque surfaces. A hundred and fifteen years down the track (so to speak), SHIMURABROS. have traced these two instances with their X-ray Train where the film’s projected light probes a series of screens and achieves the appearance of mass, inviting viewers to navigate their way around a moving image and experience it as a form with not just width and breadth but also depth.

The blurring of two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality is also the basis of the duo’s new photographic sculpture works on show, Roppongi and Nihombashi (2010) (above). Here the artists scanned the roads of select districts in Tokyo on Google Maps Street View and located several gaps ­– blurred lines that can be located on Street View all around the world, wherever the computer-generated photograph is partially incomplete. They then cast these sections of the road in fibre-reinforced plastic and mounted them so the digital images, including their erroneous creases, become materialised as something that straddles the image/object divide.

Part of the ongoing project to stretch images beyond the limitations of the screen’s flat surface, an earlier video installation, SEKILALA – uncovered family (2006-2008) (above), was also included in the exhibition. Here, a family drama is played out with multiple vantage points as figures appear on three screens in close proximity, facing each other but unable to touch each other. Things seem to them to be within reach, yet as with the grapes and curtains of our antiquity painters, any attempt to grasp hold of them is in vain. This work extends not only the conventional spacial limitations of film, but also the temporal ones. As with the automated, authorless images of Google Maps, the editing of the images here is not conscious, and thus the stories that emerge cannot be predicted. With 26 scenes of varying durations played out randomly, an infinite narrative unfolds of its own accord, and this strategy of indifference raises the question of whether editing without intentionality can still be considered editing.

The rendering of film as form takes a different manifestation in Film Without Film (2010) (above), the exhibition’s titular work. Presented as a response to Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov and his pioneering theories of montage and creative geography, the work gives volume to cinematic images with the application of 3D printer technology. According to the Kuleshov Effect, the assemblage of the images in a film carries more meaning than their content, and while the original found footage used for his Film Without Film experiment is lost, SHIMURABROS. used the surviving text to re-enact it with fragmentary scenes borrowed from notable historical films that were set in Kyoto and are available on public domain. With the light from these films transformed into steel figures and mounted on a clear acrylic base representing a reel, this is evidently film without film but also film about film, a metacinema that has its own layered history wound through it and foregrounded as its raison d’être.

PHOTOS OF X-RAY TRAIN AT THE 2010 BIG IN JAPAN EVENT …

A. Square is the name of a square who lives in a land of two dimensions, Flatland. One day he has a strange encounter a being from a three-dimensional place, Spaceland. Being from a world of width and breadth but no depth, A. Square cannot perceive this foreign body, but none the less they have a long chat about two dimensionality and three dimensionality, before taking off together and making brief stops at Lineland, a place of one dimension and Pointland, where there is no dimension. A. Square soon comes upon the radical idea that if there is a third dimension that he can come to imagine but never fully comprehend, then there must conceivably be a fourth dimension that those from Spaceland could think about, but not perceive. It’s all in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a most excellent short novel written by an English schoolmaster called Edwin Abbott Abbott in 1884 that remains surely the single best description of the dimensions and the possible relations between them.

Part of Yokohama-based artist Yusuke Shigeta’s examination of the ways three-dimensional space might conceivably interact with two-dimensional space if such a thing existed, an animation series called narrative kinetics will be presented next week in the video art program at Big In Japan in Sydney and Melbourne. In Euclidean geometry a square is both a rhombus (meaning it has equal sides) and a rectangle (meaning it has equal angles). Thanks to this uncommon equality in the square’s form it boasts quadruple symmetry, meaning it can be rotated four times while appear exactly as itself. It can also be divided or multiplied by four infinitely without ever altering its form, a property that is beautifully exploited in these thoughtful works.

Yusuke’s fascination with flat geometry in relation to physical space has also led the artist several times to experiments with cartography, and he recently released an app. based on antique maps of Edo (the old city of Tokyo) that allows users to go back in time as they navigate the modern city. If you are in Tokyo or planning on being there it’s available here.

Sounds are invisible vibrations travelling through space that may be heard if they reach an ear. Lyota Yagi makes his sounds temporarily tangible by taking silicon casts from his favourite records, filling them with water, and freezing them. These frosty ‘vinyls’ hold entire compositions that proceed to melt into puddles, the music gradually becoming audibly and materially degraded.

In contrast to rock star guitar smashing or George Maciunas’ Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, these works are founded on a premise of self-destruction, where they fall victim to the natural law of entropy – the second property of thermodynamics which states that all energy is eventually neutralized.

Lyota’s video work Time Cosmique documents several of these ephemeral sonic sculptures as well as select other projects, and will be presented as part of the curated video art component of our Big In Japan events this month. Crossing multiple disciplines of sculpture, interactive installation, performance and video, the artist’s previous works have continued similar themes of sound in relation to time and space, and often returned to the revolving form of the vinyl record …

Shadows exist on surfaces as pure image without detail, colour or mass. Immaterial, elusive and ungraspable, they were mistrusted by Plato as representing fraudulent imitations of reality, distractions from truth and knowledge. To be liberated, the prisoners in his cave would have to come outside and face the fully dimensioned world of sunlight – the opposite of darkness, the antithesis of deception. But actually light and dark exist only in and through each other – a shadow needs a source of light from which to be cast and stars cannot be seen in the day because only darkness gives form to light. Arlo Guthrie said in a few words what Samuel Todes and others have said in many: “You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in”.

For Yukihiro Taguchi’s recent installation at Gallery αM in Tokyo, the Osaka-born Berlin-based artist likened the configuration of the basement gallery space to those enclosed subterranean realms never reached by daylight, caves. With this as his starting point, he created an interwoven, participatory system of shadows, lights, found domestic junk precariously arranged, and ongoing photo documentation. It seemed to extend in several directions from Tu m’ (1918), where some of Duchamp’s icons – the wheel and hatstand – were used to “do a painting with cast shadow” by way of exploring the relationship between two dimensionality and three dimensionality, image and thing.

Plato thought the light of the sun was the ultimate, unpolluted truth and anything else was secondary, but as this exhibition showed, the relationship between light and authenticity is more conflicted than we might assume. The nature of light is such that it can be propagated through projection and reflection endlessly without suffering any loss to the source. The moon, for example has no light of its own; its illumination is a forgery, borrowed from the sun. In the intricately built space the illegitimate shadows of Plato’s cave became their own authentic fakes, independent of sunlight and indifferent to the notion of originality.

The title of the show, Cave, was projected near the entrance to the gallery via a methodically placed hand-mirror that picked up light from outside the room. Second-hand light was also recorded live by camcorder and transmitted to a projector which then cast the shadow of a representation of a horse from the Lascaux complex of caves (estimated to be 17,000 years old) via a page from a second-hand book of reproductions. Sources of origin were consciously made indistinguishable from the interacting forms of reproduction.

As with the young artist’s other recent performative installations, a camera sat on a tripod for the duration of the show silently working away at time-lapse documentation of the perpetually incomplete set-up. The thousands of photographic images will later be compiled in an autonomous stop-motion video work, forming yet another layer of representation. Besides the common analogy of photography and shadows (dating way back Fox Talbot who described the first photographic images as skiagraphy, meaning ‘shadow writing’), the camera’s presence brought to mind Susan Sontag’s statement that the power of photography has “de-Platonized our understanding of reality”, making it no longer plausible to distinguish between images and objects, shadows and realities, copies and originals.

In one corner of Taguchi’s cave the passing of time was documented by the shifting shadows of a tall, single stem pink tiger lily that stood in an emptied wine bottle on the floor before a spot light. On the first day of the exhibition the artist traced the cast silhouette of the freshly cut flower on the wall in pencil, and over the weeks that followed the growing distance between these marks and those of the real live shadows made evident the drooping flowers’ more salubrious past, as well as their imminent extinction. It was a simple gesture of marking duration, and death, through the interplay of artist’s impression of shadows and ‘original’ shadows.

While at first glance it appeared to be a cacophonous and arbitrary arrangement, the evolving space was executed with great skill, exactitude and wit. As with any visual trace of a shadow, what it amounted to was a representation of a representation, but under Taguchi’s apt hands the reconfiguration of time, layering of shadows and interweaving of copies ensured any pretence of originality (the sun) was eclipsed.

An exhibition I put together on a recent Japan Foundation residency in Tokyo, Spooky Action at a Distance is open at Black & Blue Gallery in Sydney for the next two weeks. The show features recent video works from a diverse group of Japanese artists who who have not been shown in Australia before, including the body hacking of Daito Manabe, the strange world of the faceless dance ensemble KATHY, the Super Rat escapades of the controversial Chim↑Pom collective, culinary absurdity from Crazy Hat & Long Ear, kinetic banality from Tetsushi Higashino, reconfigured animalia from Ine wo Ueru hito, deft stop-motion transformation of floors and furniture by Yukihiro Taguchi, and the home made adventures of the self-proclaimed “masters of girl magic”, Kiiiiiii. For individual information on the spooks click on the images below:

Crazy Hat & Long Ears is a duo formed last year by Tama Arts University students Ryoko Iwata and Saki Akiyama. Their Lewis Caroll-esque video works Our full courses and The law of the jungle on the table feature eating, glorious messiness, jungles on tables and general culinary absurdity. Check them out at Spooky Action at a Distance, opening this Friday at Black & Blue Gallery to coincide with the Big In Japan! event on Wednesday. As Ryoko and Saki say, “let’s eat happy”.

Fellow Osakans Tomoko Inagaki and Takuma Uematsu first paired up on the occasion of a group exhibition called I meet … , which showcased various artist collaborations. They hadn’t initially intended to form a unit, but the experience of working together was so rewarding that they decided to join artistic forces, under the moniker Ine wo Ueru hito (meaning “person who plants rice” and incorporating both their names INagaki and UEmatsu).

“The concept of Ine wo Ueru hito is to remove ego and think beyond ourselves,” the artists say. “Usually artists work and think individually. We are both also individual artists and think individually, but in this unit we try to produce work by thinking about and caring for the other. We don’t fight and cherish the process of making the works peacefully.”

Their first collaborative works One day, I meet… Parts 1 + 2 were exhibited in Tokyo at HPGRP Gallery and Nadiff last month, and from next week they will be shown at Spooky Action at a Distance, the Big In Japan exhibition of Japanese video art opening at Black & Blue Gallery on December 4 from 6pm. Combining sculpture, illustration and performance, the two part video is teeming with visual trickery, reconfigured animals and the strangely comforting relentless mundanely of vacuuming.

An omnibus video work compiling several restrained kinetic scenarios that celebrate the ordinary and banal, Tetsushi Higashino’s KINE (above) will be presented at the upcoming Big In Japan exhibition Spooky Action at a Distance. Like all his experiments, it uses the materials of daily life as both media and message. The artist’s other ongoing works in progress include Hydroponic Nose Hair, an attempt to grow a plucked nose hair in water, and Pnoom (below), which sees him sneak around the neighbourhood on garbage collection day, making temporary stacked towers out of empty cans.

For more on Tetsushi see here and here.

When Yukihiro Taguchi (aka Yuki) started out exhibiting installation work, he found himself compelled to alter and evolve the arrangements continually for the duration of his shows. He then realised that his photographic documentation of the changes had a particular interest of their own, and that led to his current practice of performative installation.

Elaborate rearrangements of things are documented by thousands of pictures taken on stop-motion, thereby forming endless reconfigurations of space and time. For his recent exhibition at his Tokyo gallery Mujin-to Productions, Yuki conducted one of his ‘performative sketches’ from the other side of the world. Every nook and cranny of the tiny room (tiny even by Tokyo standards) was covered with his idiosyncratic drawings, including new ones which were sent to the gallery by fax daily from the artist’s base in Berlin. The process was documented by a camera set on automatic in the room, and the images taken will form a video work at a later date.

Other recent projects have applied a similar concept to outdoor public spaces (which Yuki says is much easier to do in Berlin, where the regulation of city space is infinitely more lax than it is in Japan). His acclaimed Moment series, for example, saw him take the wooden boards from a gallery floor and place them in endlessly evolving configurations all over the city – with the third and most recent volume in the series completed in Rio de Janeiro.

While the artist is never seen in the works, his presence is always evident. It is physically demanding stuff, requiring weeks or sometimes months of consistent manual labour and patience. But the results are fascinating, always forcing us to reconsider our relationships to our surroundings.

Yuki recalls that when he returned the floorboards to the gallery floor after taking them away on various adventures for four weeks, the residents of the building and anyone who had visited the installation during the project felt that the boards seemed strangely unnatural back in their original context, as if being removed from their location and function had fundamentally altered them. He took this as confirmation that new relationships with our daily landscapes and material surrounds can and should be explored.

Yukihiro Taguchi’s recent ‘performative sketch’ installation at Mujin-to in Tokyo.

In an earlier series of works, Yuki held gatherings in bubbles and documented their slow deflation.

Floor boards sneaking away and getting up to mischief around Berlin.

With new energy and expression being granted to everyday things like floors, furniture and air, the allure of Yuki’s work is that of the ancient art form of puppetry; making the inanimate animate and creating life from lifelessness.

Yukihiro Taguchi is one of seven Japanese artists to have video work included in Spooky Action at a Distance, opening at Black & Blue Gallery in Sydney at 6pm on December 4, and running until December 19.

Nagi Noda’s death on September 7 2008 robbed the world of an unbridled imagination that fed on surrealist pop and hilarious, super-kawaii fantasy. Lest we forget. Not that we could even if we wanted to: everything she touched became infused with her idiosyncratic, candy-coloured exuberance, leaving a vivid impression on all who were exposed to her work.

A film director, graphic designer, toy maker, art director and fashion designer, Nagi was born in Tokyo and spent 5 years in New York before returning to Japan in ‘87. She worked as a multi-disciplinary new media artist for various projects and exhibitions; created ad campaigns for clients including the La Foret department store in Harajuku, Nike and Coca Cola; started a fashion label with artist Mark Ryden, made countless music videos for the likes of Cut/Copy, Scissor Sisters and Japanese pop star Yuki, and made the amazing hair hats pictured below.

Her passing at age 35 was apparently due to complications from surgery she had after a car accident the year before. Sheila Stepanek, CEO of her agency Partizan, reported that the she died “in her Mark Ryden dress, Chanel boots and perfect make-up with Viktor & Rolf lace black eye lashes.”

Surely the most narcissistic of all mediums, video art since its rise to fame in the 1960s has been closely associated with explorations of the self and, more broadly, the nature of identity. At the forefront of the rise of video art was Takahiko Iimura, an artist whose explorations of selfhood delved deeper than many of his contemporaries and successors have.

His first film, On Eye Rape, was a collaboration with Natsuyuki Nakanishi and was essentially an assertion of the Japanese public’s right to see pubic hair. It was 1962, a time of strict censorship in Japan, and the artists ‘rescued’ an American sex ed. film from a bin in Tokyo before splicing pornographic imagery throughout it and punching holes in most of the frames.

Having spent most of the ‘60s in New York mingling and collaborating with the likes of Yayoi Kusama, Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono, Iimura went back to Japan in the early ‘70s and has continued his work in many parts of the world. His later films and videos became less focused on social criticism and more involved with abstract ideas of language, spectatorship, time and space. While he has remained radically experimental he was always deeply connected with Zen spirituality and traditional Japanese aesthetics; in two films he looked at the Japanese idea of ‘ma’, a unique concept of space and time, which he explored through the famous Zen garden of Ryoan-ji.

Below is a video still from his work AIUEONN Six Features (1993), which comprises distorted faces that visually animate the six vowels of the Japanese language. If you want to see the original (assuming such a thing exists in the land of new media art) The Collected Films of Takahiko Iimura No 1 features AIUEONN along with his Filmmakers documentary (a portrait of his favourite avant-garde filmmakers including Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, and of course, himself), as well as several other seminal works.

My how the world would be dull without magnetic fields. No microphones, no rockets, no doorbells, no compasses, no cassettes, no credit cards, no magnet space wheels, no passive aggressive fridge notes between housemates, and no liquid magnetic art from Sachiko Kodama.

After graduating in physics, Kodama went on to study computer and holography art for her doctorate. She is now associate professor at University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. These pulsating sculptures are the result of her ongoing experiments with ferrofluid, a magnetic liguid that was invented in the late ‘60s by NASA. The mesmerising Morpho Towers: Two Standing Spirals came from a collaborative project with Yasushi Miyajima, who created the musical score the forms are dancing to.

Kodama says that while these works were created with state-of-the art electromagnetic technology, they are inspired by natural phenomena like the ocean, tornados, plant life, sea urchins and rhythms of breath. She imagines that in the future, artificial intelligence may be applied to such materials and techniques as hers, and “if this becomes reality, computers that mimic natural forms may offer a more calm, relaxing and comfortable user experience.”