Imagine two friends writing to each other, but using pictures and not words. Each week, the photocopies cross, providing impressions of what has been important to the two people. In a synthesized way, the pictures give a representation of that, but the choice of the pictures is also inspired by the reaction of the picture that the other one sent the week before. Before you know it, the friends have developed a totally individual image idiom after a few weeks of communicating. Sometimes the themes of the week are easy to discern, but sometimes, the puzzling over what the other actually meant with last week's picture produces strange turns in the communication. After all, pictures can have many unintended connotations. Something like this is happening in the Renga project from the K-Bit Institute, director Keigo Yamamoto. The idea was to use the Internet for ping pong communication with images which were adjusted by the receiver and sent back again. Furthermore, the image-communication was also set within the discrepancy between rural and urban energies. As the introductory text of the project explains, the Institute is worried about the future. Urban and rural approaches to the world must be in harmony, otherwise it will all go terribly wrong. The aim of the project is to review that harmony using the images sent back and forth and which have been provided with commentaries. The pictures show, for example, the adjusted Tokyo sky-line, to which images derived from nature have been added, probably as a critical note in this immense discourse. Elsewhere in this site, you can see what happens when this image communication is intensified by the spontaneous infusion of poetic commentaries, which are, however, only in Japanese.
During the festival week Keigo Yamamoto will give a lecture on his current work, entitled Linking Society and Linking Art.
– Willem van Weelden
|
|
|
1 9 9 7 
