archive: 'AIUEONN Six Features' by Takahiko Iimura, jp/us, 1993
Posted on Tuesday, January 04 @ 22:02:03 CET by rebecca |
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Possibly the earliest game mod, Takahiko Iimura's 'AIUEONN Six Features' was made in 1993 with Sony’s mysterious realtime texture mapping ‘System G’ game technology. 'AIUEONN Six Features' is a game of works which explores the structure of language to represent differences between East and West conceptions of time and space. Originally a video installation, in 1999 Iimura produced an interactive CDROM of the work. The work is available on his website.
The following text is from here.
"A letter or a character may be national or regional, but a sound is more universal." Takahiko Iimura
Takahiko Iimura is an international artist and experimental filmmaker, who has been working with time-based media since the 1960. Throughout his career his work has investigated the structures of language and the differences and relationships between Eastern and Western ideas about time and space. At the same time he has been fascinated by the semiotics of film and video: their narrative stuctures and the way we 'read' both individual still images and moving audio-visual sequences.
Iimura came to New York in 1966, and became involved in the of avant garde movement there, which included artists Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik. Much of his work seeks to disrupt the ways we view film and video, often by paring it down to its essential, frame by frame elements in order that the audience become aware of its construction as much as its content. In this way he is also attempting to understand why we view moving images the way we do, whether that is projected on a cinema screen, through a TV monitor, or now on computers.
Working in different cultural contexts, in Japan, America and Europe, Iimura has made a number of pieces which explore identity, forcing the viewer to question how we visually and aurally perceive and try to 'place' others.
'AIUEONN: SIX FEATURES' has been presented in a number of formats. These include a single video projection, an installation of six TV monitors facing the viewer and also a performance where the artist and the projection appear side by side, competing for the viewer's attention.
Each screen shows a sequence, beginning with the Roman characters representing English vowel sounds and the Japanese characters representing the vowels in Japanese. We then see Iimura's face, contorting and distorting as he pronounces one of the six vowel sounds of the Japanese alphabet: A, I, U, O and E, all of which also appear in the English alphabet and finally NN which is unique to Japanese. The images have been manipulated by computer animation techniques so that his face becomes an exaggerated icon to represent the sound which accompanies it. These sequences are then repeated. The sound of the vowel at first sychronises with the image, but later de-syncronises.
"If you know Japanese, you perceive the video differently from someone who doesn't know Japanese. Yet those who know Japanese also become confused initially, as the voice doesn't synchronise with the image. I tried to separate the sound from the image and treat them differently." Takahiko Iimura
The effect of these exaggerated sounds and images is both funny and confusing, underlining the experience of being lost between two cultures, illustrating the slippages and misunderstandings which occur when one feels 'foreign'. By working in two languages, the piece also illustrates the relationship between the linguistic sound and the alphabet character representing it, which is conventional rather than natural.
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