MICHAL CÁB: Small in Japan / Poème électronique pour le monde
Extract from A.I.R.report for Youkobo Gallery
To describe my residency at Youkobo gallery which lasted for two and a half of month is not a piece of cake. It was always an unspoken notion for me to visit Japan and to be faced to the Otherness (E. Levinas) – in any possible meaning – artistic, cultural, ethical, scientific, and religious. One old friend right after I come back to Prague in January told me this first sentence: “Yeah, I heard about one architect who visited Tokyo and afterwards gone out of his mind. How do you feel?”
It is true, that I was partially blasted off with certain experiences (Pachinko slots, Kabukicho and Nakano district, Electric city at Akihabara, non-presence for noise limit at places as Shibuya, Hokusai original shunga woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), gamification and commercialization of society, Onsen, and so on, and so on) but I have to confess that Japanese culture is very plausible to me. Although I got realized that Japanese way of doing things is about kind of obeying to given orders (i.e. there is kind of totality) I found many examples which stress an importance of individuality. This is how I interpreted my first impression with local unique architecture. Second: Japan (or maybe I should say only Tokyo because in fact I did not leave a city much) is for me a culture of extreme poles – on one side there is noise-color-chaotic life all around stations and on the other side you can just make few steps aside and find yourself in a tranquility of shinto or buddhistic temple. This mixture and extremes are somehow present also in daily culture where Shichi-Go-San traditional celebration is shaking hand with KFC celebration of Christmas. List of examples could continue…
Well but besides this many other events happened. Of course I tried to get know and comprehend Tokyo and Japanese culture which is completely impossible. Maybe this was subconscious feeling and motive why I made short performance called “Small I Japan”... Well – I get touched with local noise musicians as Hakobune (Takahiro Yorifuji) or LZ129 (Ryota Okazaki) and we organised some gigs around Shinjuku (Buena Art Space, Rental Space). In gallery we had a jam-session with Satoshi Ikeda and Yoko Arai. I visited all main national galleries and scientific museums and checked out also some smaller events (home based projects, some performances which were part of Tokyo experimental festival).
Whatever – let me say something about my “artistic mission”. In proposal I suggested that I – as a sound-artist – can work and develop multichannel sound system. That sound-system is to be open-source based on Raspberry Pi2 microcomputer and programmed in Pure Data. It is supposed to be modular – as number of sound channels is derived from number of Raspberry Pi clients – and it is supposed to be also variable – as system is using wireless WiFi network so it can be adjusted in any way to various spaces. This was defined as a “main goal” of residency and this work was presented at my final exhibition. I composed short electro-acustic composition Poème électronique pour le monde as a tribute to E. Varese. There is still a lot of issues to upgrade and solve which I am going to deal with during a spring 2016. There will be an exhibition in gallery Školská28 with title Nástrojáři (Instrument makers) where my sound-system will be presented. I am also give it a chance in theatre sound design as I will prepare a new piece with scenographer Kristýna Taübelová. After some upgrades and cleanup I will publish the whole project and code at GitHub as open-source.
Somehow important was meeting with philosopher and radio-artist Tetsuo Kogawa. We had long and intense discussion about livecoding, Prague, Franz Kafka, broadcasting and FM transmitters. Tetsuo designed minimal FM transmitter which he was using during his musical improvisations. I also implemented his design into my first exhibition which took place at Youkobo gallery. We are going also to continue in collaboration (which has already happened during a celebration of Art's Birthday event[1] and hopefully it will continue in our future Kafka project). Important was also meeting with feminist artist and performer Ito Tari who I personally visited and made some recordings with her. (Let me add that help of Youkobo team and help of Karin Písaříková was essential in getting in touch with mentioned artists.) Afterwards I implemented Tari's voice into my composition.
So generally I can say that I was very satisfied with my stay at Youkobo. I was faced to brand new and other culture which is always inspiring. And I had also time and space to work and experiment with new issues in my artistic practice – few times I even found myself so deeply sunk into my work that I was thinking to myself: “Hey, you are in Tokyo, you should get out and get some life...” So I followed my inner voices which is usually a good way... Just hope that our collaboration can continue somehow in the future.
Michal Cáb
(If you want to read more about him here you have his blog: http://ticho.multiplace.org)
