ヴィデオアート研究会
「Community of Images アメリカ、フィラデルフィアから日本の戦後映像芸術を振り返る」ゲスト・足立アン、進行・瀧健太郎
https://jasias.jp/archives/33890
ヴィデオアート研究会
瀧健太郎 English below
黄金町バザール+上大岡バザール2025 通過中 We Meet Along the Way
《家具の光学》は、カメラ・オブスクラの仕組みを応用したインスタレーションとオブジェのシリーズです。窓や外部の景色に近い場所に設置することで、暗箱の中に鮮明なイメージを投影することができます。タイトルはエリック・サティの「家具の音楽」から拝借しました。サティは1920年代、意識的に聴かれる音楽ではなく、家具や調度品のように空間に自然に存在し、行為を妨げない音楽を提案しました。拙作もまた、意識的に鑑賞される映像作品ではなく、そこにあるだけで風景やイメージを提示することを意図しています。そしてそれを広義の環境・公共空間に展開することを視野に入れました。電子映像に満ちた日常に、あえてアナログで光学的な「見る」体験を差し挟みたいと考えています。
《家具の光学》シリーズは一昨年の春に着手しました。最初はマルチ画面型の《アルゴスI》、続いて《カメラ・オブスクラ=スツール》、携帯型の《アルゴスII》、テーブル上の《カメラ・オブスクラ=テーブル》を制作。さらに今年の夏には、複数の暗箱を吊り下げる《カメラ・オブスクラ=モビール》や、頭部に装着する《アルゴスIII:カメラ・オブスクラ=ヘッドギア》を発表しました。その後も展示直前まで、《階段箪笥》や《アクセサリー入れ》といった家具型の作品を制作しました。
私がカメラ・オブスクラに興味を持ったきっかけは、約10年前、橋本典久氏と共に担当していた美大での実習授業です。初回には必ず、学生が段ボールと虫眼鏡、トレーシングペーパーで簡易のカメラ・オブスクラを作り、初めて像が結ばれる瞬間に立ち会いました。以来、自身のオブジェ作品にも応用し、横浜や福岡での展覧会、さらに黄金町の《E-Nightwatch E-夜警》(2023)にも出品しています。
テーブルの上に風景を投影する装置です。皿や書物の上を人や車が通過していく様子は、箱庭的なイリュージョンを生みます。
木製の暗箱を吊り下げ、ゆっくりと揺れながら映す対象を変えていくモビール作品です。以前の《監視の詩学 Poetics of Surveillance》(2022)での試作を発展させ、今回はよりエレガントで温かみのある仕上がりを目指しました。
これら三作には、ブライアン・イーノが立ち上げた「オブスキュア・レコード」からの一枚、ペンギン・カフェ・オーケストラのLPを微かに流しています。「Obscure(曖昧な/暗い)」という語は「Camera Obscura(暗箱)」と同語源であり、サティやイーノが目指した音楽的背景とも響き合っています。
棚や箪笥を視覚装置に転用し、引き出しのように多方向から風景を鑑賞できる作品です。公共空間に設置することで偶然の観客を巻き込み、風景やアート鑑賞の在り方を問い直す試みです。
カメラ・オブスクラの魅力は「見る」という営みの原理を可視化する点にあります。肉眼で直接見る「目視」と、現代の電子的イメージ=「電視」の間に位置する装置として、カメラ・オブスクラは独自の体験を提供します。《アルゴス》シリーズは、ギリシャ神話の百目の巨人アルゴスに倣い、複数のレンズで光がある限り映像を映し続けます。スマートフォンで容易に動画を閲覧できる時代にあえて、風景を「切り取って見る」こと、「アートを鑑賞する」ことを改めて考える契機となれば幸いです。またこのような作品を欧州からカメラの技術が伝来した横浜の地で発表できたことも、とても意義深いと考えています。
展覧会サイトへ:黄金町バザール+上大岡バザール2025 通過中 We Meet Along the Way
Furniture Optics is a series of installations and objects that employ the mechanism of the camera obscura. Installed near windows or exterior views, the darkened boxes clearly project the surrounding scenery. The title is borrowed from Erik Satie’s Musique d’ameublement (Furniture Music). In the 1920s, Satie proposed music that would not demand focused listening, but rather exist in a space like furniture—natural and unobtrusive. Likewise, my works are not intended solely for conscious viewing but are meant to present images simply by being there. The project is conceived with the possibility of extending into broader environments and public spaces. Amid today’s flood of electronic images, I wanted to reintroduce an analog, optical way of “seeing.”
I began the Furniture Optics series in the spring of 2023. The first work was the multi-screen piece Argus I, followed by Camera Obscura = Stool, the portable Argus II, Camera Obscura = Table, and in the summer of 2024, Camera Obscura = Mobile and Argus III: Camera Obscura = Headgear. Just before this exhibition, I also created Step Shelf and Accessory Case.
My interest in the camera obscura originates about a decade ago, when I co-taught a university studio class with Norihisa Hashimoto. On the first day, every student built a simple camera obscura from cardboard, a magnifying glass, and tracing paper. Watching them experience the projected image for the first time was always a striking moment. Later I incorporated the device into my own object works, including figure-like sculptures with lenses and screens mounted on the head. These were exhibited in Yokohama and Fukuoka, as well as at the exhibition E-Nightwatch E-Yakei (2023) in Koganecho, Yokohama.
Camera Obscura = StoolThe seat and backrest project the outside scenery. The idea recalls Nam June Paik’s TV Chair (1968), in which a TV monitor was embedded in the seat, but I was more directly inspired by Shiro Kuramata’s furniture designs. By experimenting with lenses, mirrors, and prototypes, I created a chair where the same view appears as both upright and inverted images. When one turns one’s back toward the window, the experience of “sitting on the landscape” becomes possible.
Camera Obscura = TableThis device projects scenery onto the tabletop, so that plates or books become screens. When people or cars pass outside, their images move across the dishes, producing a miniature, diorama-like illusion.
Camera Obscura = MobileDark wooden boxes equipped with lenses and screens are suspended by threads, gently moving and shifting the projected views. This work developed from my earlier Poetics of Surveillance (2022), which employed cameras and monitors in a mobile-like balance. In contrast, the new version emphasizes warmth and elegance.
These three works are accompanied by faint background music: the Penguin Cafe Orchestra LP released on Brian Eno’s “Obscure Records” in 1975. The label’s name, Obscure—meaning “dim” or “unclear”—shares the same etymology as obscura in camera obscura, and also echoes Satie’s concept of “furniture music.”
Argus I is a multi-screen device with independent lenses and focal lengths, enabling a poly-perspective view of the same scene. Argus II is a smaller, portable version with foldable paper structure, designed for travel use. It was recently used to record views from the Colosseum in Rome, a train to the airport, a hotel window, and later from Osaka’s Cosmo Tower and a Shinkansen passing Mount Fuji. These recordings appear in the single-channel video Boxed Travels (2025).
Argus III: Camera Obscura = Headgear is a wearable version with multiple lenses pointing in different directions. Visitors can walk around with the device, experiencing a shifting composite of upright and inverted images, cropped in squares, triangles, or circles—an insect-eye view of the world.
Wooden furniture pieces are adapted into optical devices, projecting multiple views as if pulling out drawers. Installed in public space, they invite passersby to engage with the surrounding scenery in a primitive yet playful way, reframing everyday perception.
The fascination of the camera obscura lies in its ability to structure the basic principle of vision. If direct sight is “vision,” and modern media environments are dominated by electronic “tele-vision,” then the camera obscura occupies the interval “between vision and television.” The Argus series, named after the hundred-eyed giant from Greek mythology, continues to project quietly through its multiple lenses as long as light exists. In an age when moving images are instantly available on smartphones, I hope these works provide an occasion to reconsider what it means to “frame a view” and “experience art.”
I consider it highly significant that this work could be presented in Yokohama, the very place where camera technology was first brought from Europe.
exhibition site: Koganecho Bazaar + Kamiooka Bazaar 2025 We Meet Along the Way
Between Frames: Takahiko Iimura and the Aesthetics of Discrete Time
Production Note
Examination of Mobile Projection
Or about the Body Double of Kentaro Taki Ran Up Buildings
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| "Come and Go"(2015)left, "V-climbing Highl Lines"(2015)right |
Usually, film or video performances in the room have limited movement because of the power supply or video input length, which was a problem. So, I always think about how it is possible to express something with the free movement of a projector. One day a high-performance mobile battery which was a handy one, was rolled out for necessary evacuation after a 3.11 earthquake disaster. This mobile battery contains a battery for motorcycles, it can convert charged power as 100V output, and that cost is low to charge mobile phones and laptop PC and get it easier than before. I found that I could use a 20W table projector for 30-40 minutes ca., and this made me hit upon the idea of mobile projection right away.
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| Instrument of Mobile Projection |
In the premiere performance in Kagurazaka, I made a 3-minute video with my acting just climbing up or running to the sides and put that footage into a laptop computer to play it as a loop. More than 10 people were announced at the gathering point, and also with the audience who passed thereby happenings, I, Kentaro TAKI started to move around to project video images on the facade of shops and walls without any rehearsal, sometimes I projected images on someone's back and I have done 30 minutes long pedestrian performance.
I learned later that when ancient Japan imported European iron-made magic lantern from the Netherlands and Belgium in the Edo era, some Japanese man created an original wooden magic lantern called Furo, and demonstrated it as an Edo Utsuchie projection theater play at nighttime. Edo Utsushie’s birthplace was Kagurazaka. Because of the customizing lighter and its gimmick of slides of the projector, the play of Edo Utsushie was developed differently and uniquely from Fantasmagoria, the Western magic lantern show. My idea was also just about downsized and mobility of both video projector and battery, and it brought me to hit upon the idea to go out and project human image on the wall. I felt some kind of fate that I did my premiere mobile projection performance in Kagurazaka which was the birthplace of Edo Utsushie.
In Shibuya’s version, I collaborated with Sayuri Iimori, a contemporary dancer, and her performance in front of circle shaped screen in the UPLINK factory was shot by a fixed camera, and broadcasted through live streaming to the outside which Taki projected that image on the street wall. And, those outside projections were shot to deliver to the project on the screen in the theater room where Iimori danced. In this little complicated structure, the audience in the theater watched both live performances and broadcasted projection images on the street as a film screening, audience on the street watched Iimori’s activities on the building facade and the physical projectionists' movement at the same time.So, this performance provided two different appreciative experiments.
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| Performance in Kyoto, left, in Surabaya, middle, in Shikinejima, right |
Except version in Kyoto and Surabaya, In Clearmont-Ferrand, Taipei, and Shikinejima, I projected images of not only me but also other performers and mixed several people trying to climb up on the buildings and the walls. (I used a car battery connected to a car as a power supply in Clermont-Ferrand) For Yokohama’s performance, I prepared not a looped video source but a 30-minute video source where I acted to climb or to move horizontally way, which was shot by the camera set on the ceiling for the same duration as the performance on the street. So, in several scenes where I seemed to be tired and took a rest, I was really exhausted by acting in that shooting.
The main purpose of this mobile performance was to hybrid image of the body and urban space. What made me feel it so interesting was the physical transportation of the author with a projector and battery on his back, at the same time, various superhuman-like movements of his body double in projection video by climbing unusual high places and getting into physically non-intrudable space and he has also physical fatigue. The body double of the protagonist has been always the eternal theme of moving images since cinema was invented. Before the cinema, they say that people loved phantasmagoria, a magic lantern show that visualized famous people who were not able to be there, or a spirit rapping show with the dead person. After my death, someone can project the image of Kentaro Taki climbing up the building somewhere in the future. The body double lives longer than the original in this media society. Same as the first performance in Kagurazaka, even in Yokohama, my main and best audience was children. They stuck to me in the front line, and they were glad and shouted to look at where the body double climbed. Someone told me that this performance was similar to the story of Pied Piper. The audience didn’t know where they would be guided, they had no specific goal, so it looked like Pied Piper’s
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| Performance on the street of Clermont-Ferrand(photo: La Montagne) |
During this performance, I had a lot of things to do. I had to change the image size of the projection by an adjustor, to focus the image, and to consider where to project and how to move to the next spot by inspecting the structure and the color of buildings. Because the pre-recorded video source had an upper and a downside and showed the figure’s head came to the upper side. So when I projected him on a pillar, the ceiling of the train bridge, or a temporal partition wall for example, I tried to adjust it just like he seemed to climb up/down on them, by changing the angle of the projector itself, tilted it, and sometimes I had to re-hold it to be turned image in 180 degrees smoothly. As body-double of me really existed and he moved with his will freely to go various places, I made an effort to manipulate the projector. Also pre-recorded video also sounded like shortness of breath when I acted, and during recording, I could not know where my image would be projected. (The sound was from a parametric speaker and reflected on the wall to the audience.) So, when I projected that image in my performance, I added my shout to direct that he might fail to climb up with obstacle objects around him and his projected area.
The funniest moments of this performance were when I projected and moved an image of my body double on somewhere usually nobody paid any attention, however audience looked upon and gazed at such a place because of the projection. There are so many unexpected and encountered objects and structures in our urban space, such as the concrete structures of the high-leveled train lines, the outdoor unit of air conditioners, ducts, electric pole, equipment for traffic and construction, and their signs with numbers... Once the body double of the artist was projected on these usually ignored objects and structures, people see the projected person and unseen objects at the same time. At this moment, my mind was simulating the intention of projecting otherself, and I felt that I could combine myself with walls and buildings. Thus, the author controlled his body double image as a puppet or the projected object, The urban surface guided the author, there was no clear border between them but a certain gameplay relation. This performance started as the assignment of how we could get out from the frame of video/ moving image of the electric image as our ancestors, experimental and structural film pioneers deviated which I mentioned above.
Essentially film needs a dark room and moving images after video’s invention had been basically on display inside of the room. On the other hand, many modernized tools and technologies as smartphones or digital signage don’t need darkness anymore but we still cannot escape from the frame of flat squares except by touching them, even in the era we can take them away from the room to the outside it. Thus, we are entering a time in “we shut ourselves even we are outside”.
As well as these issues on the regulation of media and field, it was another situation when we had to be blocked and in a kind of house arrest during years of pandemic, which concerned with the idea of my performance. It was why I reconsidered doing this performance again, that I felt my desire to be liberated from life by just facing the virtual world of the web, with connecting cables all the time, to jump out to the real public space after getting better of the COVID-19 situation. That action was to correspond to the questions of how to identify myself out there, how to face urban elements, and whether I could disclose myself there. This performance was for me a kind of unplugged and improvisational piece of video artwork, which was totally different from my other single-channel video pieces.
We had about 30 audiences for the first time, and more than 60 for the second time in Yokohama, this time. During my performance, you can take your position wherever you like, you can see my body double by projection or physical author who works and operates so hard in front of you. You can go to see other exhibitions on the way to it, or it is another sweet occasion that you become an On-the-Road watcher and are left from other audience groups. Since I didn’t expect so many audiences I could have, but it was great thankful that the staff of KAMC guided them not to get off the car road or not to be interrupted by the other transportation concerning safety. The audience tried to follow the performer for 30 minutes (or even gave up doing it), and they could share an appreciation of physical movement and spatial transfer, which were different from the cinema by sitting and the museum by guided walking. Also, we had some coincidental audience who just passed by me, they immediately shot mobile phones to understand what appeared suddenly and what was going on in their daily space.
When I had the premiere mobile performance in Kagurazaka, I was 42 years old, and this time I was 50 years old. It was much harder physically to act for half an hour shooting alone upon greenback than the same time span to demonstrate it on the street in front of the audience. However, I’d like to have another chance to do it while my physical condition is being OK.
制作ノート
《モバイル・プロジェクション考》または瀧健太郎の分身がビルを駆け上った件
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| photo by Haruka Hirano, YIN Yichen |
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| 神楽坂で行われた《Come and Go》(2015)左・渋谷で行われた《V-climbing Highl Lines》(2015)右 |
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| モバイル・プロジェクションの装置 |
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| 同パフォーマンスの京都版(左)・スラバヤ(中)・式根島(右) |
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| クレルモン・フェランの路上で行ったパフォーマンス(photo: La Montagne) |
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| Corresponding Cityscape (2024)Kentaro TAKI Photo by Yasyuki Kasagi |
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| drawing for installation |
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| shooting set |
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| installation system |
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| The audience could get a map above to follow projections. |
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| 《応答する都市》(2024)瀧健太郎 撮影:笠木靖之 |
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| 制作前のドローイング |
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| 撮影セットの様子 |
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| 機器の設置図 |
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| 観客はマップを元に鑑賞することができた。 |