2004

MA researcher in Tokyo Gakugei University, studying Japanese calligraphy pedagogy and classics, as well as the continuing practice of writing (Shosha).
Master thesis: comparative essay on Western modern art and Japanese traditional calligraphy and aesthetics (until the contemporary era).

Principal academic advisor: 長野秀章 教授 (Professor Hideaki Nagano)
Other academic advisors : 加藤祐司 教授 (Professor/ Mr. Yuji Kato) - 加藤泰弘 講師 (Lecturer/ Mr. Yasuhiro Kato) - 橋本栄一 講師 (Lecturer/ Mr. Eiichi Hashimoto) - 石井健 助手 (Assistant/ Mr. Takeshi Ishi).

Published by DF Press and Hermaphrodite Editions, it consists in a small dadaïst opuscule reflecting on the "obligatory mentions" which one now finds on the packages of cigarettes in Europe.
Website: www.clopepasclope.com

It aims to exceeds the limits of each discipline. Its efforts consists in sowing confusion in and reducing the borders drawn up between art, the literature, and the object of consumption.

Seizing materials considered foreign to art, this book was born, like Dada in its time, of a deep distrust towards all that takes part in the shipwreck, and particularly the language, instrument of misleading authority: TO SMOKE IS TO SMOKE.

The implicit claim of this small book goes further than the usual moralistic question : it blames, by the laughter, the man in general, who authorized if not called, what is actualy happening to him. It begins a debate not on the moral character, but moralisant and infantilisant aspect of the law: JESUS SAID: "TO SMOKE IS BAD".

This workshop was funded by the European Media Plus programme, and was dealing with the design and production of desktop interactive non-linear narratives using "live-action" video footage.

Different aspects of creating interactive movies have been explored, although the emphasis was on the visual metaphors for interaction rather than written scriptwriting.
Actual desktop production techniques were demonstrated, and a lecture-based strand presented ways in which moving images have been, and could be, made interactive: investigating structure, interface and metaphor, and the importance of content.

Discussions about the relevance of newly developing "convergence" areas of interactive digital TV and set-top boxes took place.
The practical strand showed how actual products could be piloted on a low-budget desktop system. The digital production cycle from video acquisition to multimedia authoring (Director) has be demonstrated.

A sound interactive video piece starring Marcello Mastroianni, as well as Sofia Loren' Strip-tease in "Yesterday, today and Tomorrow" had been made.

Glowlab is a Brooklyn-based arts lab dedicated to the production, documentation and presentation of multi-media work in psychogeography and public art. Glowlab features projects addressing issues of space and perception, relationships between physical locations and mental states, the nature of reality and our navigation through it.

Approaches to psychogeography vary, and include artistic, political, philosophical and scientific work in fields ranging from archaeology and cartography to programming, performance and street art. Glowlab aims to bring together these diverse perspectives and engage in dialogue on the methods and practice of psychogeography.

The contribution consisted of two letters.

With the theme simply entitled UTOPIA, ART-e-FACT wishes to provoke an interaction between theoreticians and visual artists by posing a set of questions related to contemporary society/art.

For the editorial visit this link: http://artefact.mi2.hr/_a02/lang_en/a02_editorial_en.htm.

The Digital Golem project consists of an unrecorded, world-scale, email-based, multi-language chat inspired by and starring Asian cell phones: the world's leading portable communication device. This chat would be a textual online exchange, symbolizing a digital human identity (the Golem), created and subsequently destroyed: it would live and die as a conversation does.

Nocturnal installation consisting in video projections on an audio surrounded blossoming tree during Japanese 花見(Hanami): a traditional custom of welcoming spring since the Heian Period (794-1185).
Crowds of people, families, bands of friends, and groups from companies sit under the fully open cherry blossoms, usually on plastic tarps, and have a picnic celebration.

This work seeked to propose a night time digital installation recomposing in a metaphorical way the main steps of the cycle of life (gestation, birth, childhood, teenage hood, adulthood and death) onto spring inflorescence. The sub-title of this untitled project plays on Japanese language' homophonic qualities: usual chinese caracters for 花見(Hanami) are Hana "flower" & Mi "look at", whether this project is subtitled 映娜観(hanami), respectively "projection", "sensual beauty" & "to look".

The projections were partly made of video quotations of the following movies: "Tokyo Eyes" of Jean Pierre Limosin, "Berlin, symphony of a great city" of Walther Ruttmann, "The man with the movie camera" of Dziga Vertov, "Meditation on violence" of Maya Deren, "Sans soleil" of Chris Marker and "Anemic Cinema" of Marcel Duchamp.
The sound track was parlty made of acoustic quotations from the work of the following musicians: Keith Jarrett, DJ Frederik, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Nora Shulman, Erik Satie, Frederico Del'agnese and Steve Reich.
Choreography for five dancers during the night: collaboration with DAKEI, Toyo Matsubara, Rica Akama, Asuka Itagaki and Jou.

Realized in partnership with the Hiromi Yoshii gallery and Toshiko Ferrier.
The pictures are from the French photographer Philippe Pelletier.

"Vietnam is a jungle. You had jungle warfare. Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, you have sand. -There is no need to worry about a protracted war because- from a historical basis, Middle East conflicts do not last a long time."
Dan Quayle (1947 - ), 10/2/90 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)

The pictures are from Suisse designer Claudio Colucci.

Mensa: At a dionisia, a redigestion of illusions over poorly arranged dishes, from the penis to the cheese, bottleneck, knife: projections on the white ceramic table.
At the cinema of this bacchanalian banquet of biographical videos, I would have certainly found a regardeur in good disposition, a bit gyroscopic and full of wine to all ends useful. If Cézanne spent years painting apples, "it is because this fruit is an abyss of tranquility, with germs and food," said Michel Butor¹: I would have proposed to the consumption some images to digest with food and plonk, haunted as at the screen of our desolations, forever sober of words; "drops of silence through the silence"².

1/ Michel Butor, Le Sismographe Aventureux, Ed. de la différence, 1999
2/ Samuel Beckett, The Unnomable, Minuit, 1953

"The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends or other testimony of summer nights"
-T. S. Eliot, "The Fire Sermon" The Waste Land

The pictures are from French photographer Philippe Pelletier.

Tokyo mind's eye - MJPG nonlinear digital documentary installation on contemporary Tokyo experimenting with cinema as an apparatus of memory:

In the writings of Yanagita Kunio, appears the figure of a palimpsistic imaginary where the earlier and essential layers of national life -- in the form of custom, practice, and belief -- were still able to filter through the modern overlays and provide a map for the present. Yanagita appealed the trope of a nonlinear history of custom by employing the vivid imagery of a stalactitic formation that grows unobserved into the shape of a large icicle. This brings to mind Freud's text entitled "Civilization and Its Discontents," and the dual archaeological model of Rome as the visible city of ruins and Pompeii as the lost city, buried whole.

Similar to philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro's conception of history (Jusosei), I concieve Tokyo as a pixelled city, a stratigraphic entity whom I envision as a spatial stockpiling of strategic moments in the itinerary of the spirit, each laying on top of each other yet somehow transparent.

Perhaps as the Freudian concept of screen memory, or Benjamin's concept of auratic memory drawn from Proust's memoire involontaire: Tokyo is a metropolis wrapped in measurelessness where yesterday isn't bound to tomorrow, and the snapshots taken from cell phones shortcut all dimensions.
Following Deleuze's concept of image-temps, "l'action flotte dans la situation, plus qu'elle ne l'achève ou ne la ressèrre".

Tokyo's mind's eye is shot through a handy digital camera. It is composed of short sequences - 10 seconds up to 2 minutes - played randomly, creating links among fragments of its narrative wondering, in a way comparable to hypertext on the World Wide Web. Furthermore it could be said that Freud described hypertext in 1895 in Studies on Hysteria in his description of the organisation of memory.
The piece, while reflecting on modern digital possibilities, relates to some other films' attempt to envision a city's soul, as "A propos de Nice" of Jean Vigo or "Berlin, symphony of a great city" of Walther Ruttmann, ...

Speaking of the aesthetic of time in Japan, Christine Buci-Glucksman starts with childhood memories of her father, and continues: "Tokyo is an immense envelope, a fabric of interlacing and nodes, a crossing of appearances and artifices". Tokyo mind's eye digital format (Motion JPEG) echoes a new type of consumption behavior to be witnessed in the Japanese capital, consequently to the constant increase of cell phones and cameras enabled to snapshot a broad range of "cheap" digital pictures (eventually destined to be sent throught different networks).

This project was part of Tokyo Style in Stockholm art event.
Project curated by David D'heilly, 2dk.

Using yellow chalk, a one hour long sentence written on the granitic floor of the eclectic romantic Scandinavian Pre-Modern burial chapel designed by legendary Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund in 1920, within the Woodland crematorium complex (Skogskapellet); Followed by a walk among the graves.

The building, ornated with Carl Millies's sculpture "The angel of Death", is inscribed on the world heritage list of the UNESCO.

Collaboration with Swedish breakdancers Teres Selberg and Elise Grosse.
350.000 people are buried in Woodland cemetery, including their respective grands-parents. Their costumes have been designed by Swedish fashion designer Åsa Wallenström.

The pictures are from Swedish photographer Carolina Pascual.

Project supervised by curator Veronica Wiman.

Timberline transcription of metonymic texts of the Sàmi poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää (1943-2001) onto the white bark of the arctic dwarf birches surrounding lake Kilpisjärvi, anticipating their peeling in thin papery layers.
Concurrently, installment on the pinnacle of sacred high fell Saana, of a stone collected on the summit of mount Ogura in Kyoto.

Mount Ogura is where Fujiwara Sadaie (1162-1241) compiled the Hyakunin isshu: "Small Treasury of One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets."
The shorts poetries were quoted from "Aurinko, isäni" (written in 1988; English translation, The Sun, My Father, 1997).

Japanese's tanka, as Sàmi yoiks (form of shamanic poems), is a literature which gives expression to Nature. In his essay "Walking", the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) named this "nature writing", while saying "He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him (...)". Kathleen Osgood Dana says recently of him that "he was of the mind that a person could transcend immediate experience through walking in nature. And his notion of an "excursion" is one that forms the basis for much nature writing."¹

1/ Kathleen Osgood Dana, ÀILLOHAŠ The Shaman-poet and his Govadas-image drum, A Literary Ecology of Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, Oulu University Press, 2003, page 141.

This project was part of swinging with neighbours, Russian and Nordic countries's poets gathering. Around 40 Russian and Nordic poets united with 20 Russian and Nordic artists at the premiere of the film Neighbour, recorded between 2001 and 2004 by filmmaker Carl Dieter and artist Paula von Seth.
The invited guests participated in the films and performed with readings, performances and video art.

Installation curated by Tobias Sjödin.

Curated by Li Liang for Eastlink Gallery, "Matchmaking at Suzhou Creek" was an interactive, non-profit project consisting of both a workshop and an exhibition. The project involved the art community at 50 Moganshan Lu, together with 22 artists from 13 different countries.
The pictures are from following artists: Chloe Steel (England), Liu Ming Qing (China), Tilo Kaiser (Germany) and Kylie Wilkinson (Australia).


1.- Flash performances in different public urban and social environments within the city, from east of the Huangpu River to Changning Lu, aiming to highlight the huge disparities of modern China. Elaboration of a 18' Video work filmed by Australian artist Richard Thomas, documenting an installation which occured in the old Chinese city, near the Yuyuan Gardens, starting in front of the Qin Yubo Taoist temple.




2.- Collaboration with Chinese artist Pu Jie: Installation/transcription using chalks in Chinese and English of texts focusing on China coming from www.newamericancentury.org (East Asia section) on the floor of the twelve stairways leading to the entrance of the gallery (5th floor), forcing visitors to step over it to enter the exhibit space. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is one of the key behind-the-scenes architects of the Bush administration's foreign policy.


Quote from PNAC's website: "Established in the spring of 1997, the Project for the New American Century is a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. The Project is an initiative of the New Citizenship Project.

Quote from www.disinfopedia.org: "Founded in 1994, the New Citizenship Project (also NCP, New Citizenship Project, Inc.) is a non-profit organization funded by large right-wing foundations. NCP shares the same address and suite as PNAC. According to NCP's listing in "The Right Guide", NCP and the Philanthropy Roundtable share the same phone number. The Philanthropy Roundtable's office is on the same floor of the same office building as PNAC and NCP.





- "Apneic confabulation", metaphoric under-water performance with nine Swedish women, Swedish embassy's swimming pool, Tokyo :



Metaphorical performance on the act of writting and the fear of the white page: a poetic imbathed sentence scribbed in apnea on a 76m² bed sheet fixed on the bottom of a drenched room, having to surface for fresh air every minute. Babble in this pool with nine Swedish women, standing for the muses, water spirits linked to inspiration in the greek mythology, and offsprings of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory).

Collaborators: Aia Jüdes, Signe Dagh, Katarina Bryggare, Anna Bergholm, Celine Ruben Salama, Jenny Olofsson, Lina Åkerlund, Lisa Westerdahl and Carolina Pascual.
Scuba divers, camera man and technicians: Thomas Jonsson, Jim Goddard and Steve Pace.

Curated by Henrik Cederin for Swedish Style in Tokyo 2004 art event.
With the support of Agnes B.
The pictures are from French photographers Philippe Pelletier and Laurent Benchana.


- Group Show: Improbable Monuments, Camerawork gallery, San Francisco, USA :



"Improbable Monuments is the Web portion of Monument Recall. It is an exhibition of works that explores artists' use of the Internet, our newest public space, as the place for cultural memory to reside. All the projects are unbound by materials, conventions, politics, economies and other restrictions that usually form and inform the face and voice of physical commemoratives. Here, there are no statues, no pedestals, and no monoliths.

Two ideas instigated this collection of proposals for, and sites of unlikely commemoratives: First, the usefulness of imagining the public monuments outside of the usual round of forces that shape and temper them. Second, the desire to explore the Web as a site for public monuments. The Web is profoundly redefining both art and everyday life, and public monuments should be no exception.

While fulfilling obligations of monuments, such as calling to mind events or ideas to be remembered and shared, or transmitting particular aspects of cultural values or histories beyond the life of a single generation, these Improbable Monuments are unconventional and sometimes irreverent.

All of the projects extend public commemoratives into cyberspace, and offer a foray into what promises to be a rich new site for public memory."

Project showed: Digital Golem.
Show curated by Paula Levine for Camerawork gallery.

- Publication of 8 drawings in a book of Belgian essayist Peter Kravanja on Proust and Visconti, Ed. Portaparole, Roma, Italy :



Visconti, Lettore di Proust (translated from French by Michael Fantauzzi) :
"Luchino Visconti was a great reader of "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu." While often working to bring other authors to the screen, the "cineaste of time" didn't hide his passion for Marcel Proust and his romanesque masterpiece. Many of Visconti's films, especially Il Gattopardo (1963), Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa (1965), Morte a Venezia (1971) and L'Innocente (1976), borrow from Proust's universe not only with regards to underlying intellectual themes, but also by way of explicit allusion and aesthetic. This essay examines such varied affinities, and concludes with a surprising account -- the actress Nicole Stephane reveals that in the early 70s she was set to produce for Visconti a planed adaptation of the "Recherche." Sadly, the project never came to fruition."


Peter Kravanja, Brussels, November 17th 2004.


The drawings presented in this work are "Karautsushi Sketches," karautshushi being a Japanese term (空写し) that describes the act of pressing the shutter button of a camera without producing an image, either because no film is engaged, or by advancing the roll without any deliberate framing. They are made by circumscription and superimposition, the latter procedure sometimes being used cinematographically to "place an emphasis on time's flux." Circumscription, a technique that we learn from Xenephon the painter Parrhasius excelled at, consists of tracing the border of an image.

The drawings were realized using visual documents found by a search engine, and placing a sheet of paper directly over the screen of a computer connected to the internet. This method refers a posteriori to a tradition that reaches back to the Renaissance, when the monocular perspective first systemized by Leon Battista Alberti was being refined and further developed.


ISBN 88-89421-05-3 (fr) and 88-89421-06-1 (it) - 84 pages - Ed. Portaparole (Roma) info@portaparole.it