Author Archives: mjl

Project Glass @ Google

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Google has posted information about Project Glass. The photos and video show a stylish, lightweight eyeworn see-through display operated via a speech interface, which allows you to do many of the things you already do with your iPhone, but without manual interaction. This announcement has been expected for some time and we mentioned it in an earlier post on HMDs titled Retro-Future. It will be increasingly difficult to justify the purchase of outrageously priced and bulky retro-HMDs when consumer products with superior form-factor and functionality come on to the market. Currently price estimates for the AR eyewear run from $200.00 to $600.00, but this is guessing. No doubt Google will make APIs easily available for the eyewear, so that R&D can be conducted by anyone with modest means and sufficient motivation. The video, available via YouTube, is probably mostly a mock-up and I’m wondering where the battery will be located.

Small Music – Rolf Julius Memorial – Gallery Niji

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Thanks to Atsushi Nishijima, former guest speaker in the zemi, for information about the Rolf Julius Memorial Exhibition which will be at Art Space Niji (アートスペース虹) until April 15th. Rolf Julius, who, sadly, passed away last year, was one of the earliest artists to explore relations between sounds, objects, and settings. Here is a rare and valuable opportunity to see original works by an influential sound artist right here in Kyoto. If you visit the exhibition you may have a chance to meet and talk with people who knew and worked with Julius. I met his daughter, curator and art historian, Maija Julius, gallerist  Sumiko Kumagai (熊谷寿美子) who opened Art Space Niji  in 1981, and art photographer Toshio Kuwabara (桑原敏郎) who showed a work created in collaboration with Julius. The exhibition includes works by other artists that worked with Julius, including Akio Suzuki (鈴木昭男) who is scheduled to be an invited speaker in our seminar in 2012.

Here is a photo of a work by Rolf Julius, linked directly from the Niji Gallery web site:

Access/Opening times for the Exhibition. Note here will be a symposium held at MOMAK (京都国立近代美術館) this coming Saturday afternoon.

 

新入生 2012

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Some informal observations after yesterday’s ceremony:

  • This may be our largest class yet
  • M/F ratio is abnormally high
  • Lots of suits

I wonder whether these observations reflect generational, situational changes or do they reflect changing perceptions of the faculty? I’ve heard that students from Western Japan are more reluctant to attend University in the Kanto region after 11/3/11. One can only speculate.

Marc Riboud @ Kahitsukan

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The Kahitsukan (何必館), a contemporary art gallery in Gion that frequently exhibits black and white photography, currently has a show of prints by Magnum photojournalist, Marc Riboud. The exhibition closes on April 22. If you are interested in seeing the exhibition, and would like a free ticket, let me know.

There’s a really good tsubo niwa (坪庭) on the top floor of the Kahitsukan.

 

Walking around in Nakanoshima

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Here’s a recording I made in Nakanoshima, on February 02, 2012, testing out a windshield for binaural microphones. If you listen with headphones you can hear some of the spatial qualities of the audio.

That’s a situationist yelp close to the beginning when a somewhat rude older couple hogging the sidewalk nearly walked into me. Manners!

The section at the end, a close-up recording of some kind of noisy machine for fixing the road, gives a strong percept of space. Here’s the section by itself:

Use headphones (or, more likely?, earbuds) to hear the binaural effect.

picture of the moon

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(click for larger image)

According to the EXIF data this picture of the moon was taken on 2011/11/6 at 20:10 hrs with a SONY NEX-5 and a Leitz Summicron 50mm f/2 lens. The exposure was 13 sec, with the gain set to +2EV at ISO 1600, equivalent to ISO 400. I don’t have a record of the aperture, but it was probably stopped down to prolong the (automatic) exposure. No tripod.

Here are some light paintings made with the same method, but aiming the camera along the horizon to catch photons from shops, cars, and street lamps.

(click for larger images)

Excercise: Why do the latter three ‘light paintings’ contain many segmented lines whereas the moon picture is made up of smooth continuous lines? What determines the length of these segments? Exposures for these three images were (6 sec, 3.2 sec, 3.2 sec) respectively.

Les Archives du Cœur

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Christian Boltanski, with the help of visitors to the “Archives of the Heart” located on a remote part of Teshima Island, is compiling an album of human heartbeats from around the world. Participants self-record the sound of their beating heart for inclusion in an archive at a dedicated building, which opened during the 2010 Setouchi Triennale. The building also has recording rooms and a special listening room where the heart beats are played back at loud volume. I recorded the sound of my heart on March 15, 2012 when I visited Teshima Island. Here’s how the recorded audio waveform looks:

Clearly it’s not a completely quiet recording, as the microphone was held against the chest manually. Have a listen (headphones recommended):

Retro-Futurism, continued

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For some time I have been meaning to point out an excellent article on the avant-garde Japanese architectural movement of the 1960’s known as Metabolism. The article, by Amelia Groom, is titled Past Futures, was published in Frieze magazine earlier this month, and includes an interview of Pritzker prize-winning architect/theorist Rem Koolhaas by writer/musician Nick Currie (Momus) who was a guest speaker in our zemi in late 2010. Rem Koolhaas has recently published Project Japan, Metabolism Talks, in conjunction with the Metabolism exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo last year.

The following quote from the Frieze article, a statement by Arata Isozaki (磯崎新) about the Big Roof pavillon at Expo’70, has stayed with me over the several weeks since I read the article:

Okamoto’s tower was allegedly named in reference to Season of the Sun, the 1955 novel by the disreputable current governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, in which the protagonist breaks through a shoji paper screen with his erect penis. The Metabolists’ disapproval of it is encapsulated by Arata Isozaki’s histrionic condemnation in his 2006 book Japan-ness in Architecture: ‘Alas, when at last I saw Okamoto’s tower (looking like a giant phallus) penetrating the soft membrane of the roof, I thought to myself that the battle for modernity had finally been lost.

 

Here is precisely the meeting of avant-garde modernity with kitsch in an extremely candid and memorable fashion. As we know, Kenzo Tange’s (丹下健三) Big Roof is long gone but the Tower of the Sun (太陽の塔) has become perhaps Osaka’s most iconic landmark. I also found interesting a passage claiming Taro Okamoto (岡本太郎) framed this tension in terms of a simplistic Jomon/Yayoi dichotomy:

Okamoto had pushed for modern Japan to embrace what he considered to be the dynamic, primitive spirit of the nation’s Jomon legacy (c.14,000–300BCE), as opposed to what was perceived as the refined, reductionist and aristocratic aesthetic of the subsequent Yayoi era (300BCE–300CE).

Such simplifying theories of nationality were no doubt influenced by Okamoto’s Surrealist pals during his lengthy stay in Paris in the 1930’s.