Seeing/Hearing/Speaking

Takahiro iimura
DVD, Takahiro iimura Media Art Institute
http://www2.gol.com/users/iimura/Front/html
Distruted from Heure Exquise!
esquise@nordnet.fr
ISBN 4-901181-06-8

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
mosher@svsu.edu,
Saginaw Valley State University,
University Center MI 48710
USA.

This DVD collects a quarter-century of videos and texts by the Japanese artist Takihiro iimura that are all based upon a single line. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote ‘I hear myself at the same time that I speak’ in the Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, and iimura was inspired to create the several works herein.

When the DVD is launched the viewer sees an attract mode consisting of a rapid cycle of still images, atop a sound bed of speech multi-tracked into gibberish. Visually punctuated by text reading ‘I am not seen’ or ‘I see you’, the photographic images beneath the words are duotones in blue, occasionally green or reddish brown. We see the artist’s bespectacled eyes glasses, his ear, his full face. With a click we arrive at the disc’s interface, which juxtaposes black and white video stills with color elemnts for the effectiveness expected of an elegant interactive instructional product.

The first choice on the menu is the work ‘Seeing’. iimura declaims ‘I See You’, then expounds several related philosophical propositions. We are given the process of the construction of the piece and the positions of camera1 and camera 2 as if we are about to re assemble the videos in a gallery installation. The work ‘Hearing/Speaking’ begins with iimura stating ‘You speak to yourself the same time you have been speaking’. Here we also have directions as if for installation in a gallery or museum, and one monitor includes propositions posed in the second person.

Beyond these exploded diagrams, the disk includes three video works and two texts. ‘Talking to Myself’ is a seven minute video shot in 1978, where iimura finds variations inherent in Derrida’s quote like a jazz musician riffing on an evocative musical phrase. The algorithms iimua imposes on the line are almost computer-generated, the second person fed in and new expressions issued. We see the back of the artist’s head during some statements, or the camera panning and swinging back and forth over nearly-unreadable text.

‘Talking in New York’, made between 1981 and 2001, has eight minutes of footage shot on portapak and resembles a Japanese tourist’s travel video of New York travel video (perhaps having its origin in that very genre). We see shots from a departing ferry, people in parks, Chinatown, all the while iimura reciting his variations upon Derrida in different locales and environments, silhouetted in low lighting, or under experimental recording conditions such as placing the microphone fifty feet away.

‘Talking to Myself at P.S. 1’ was made in 1985, four minutes documenting iimura’s video installation of the ‘Talking to Myself’ tapes at the New York alternative space, in greenish footage shot there by a colleague. In places the source video is fast-forwarded to add an urgency to the gallery-goers who evidently included musican-producer Brian Eno and the late filmmaker-folklorist Harry Smith.

In the first of the two text on the Seeing/Hearing/Speaking DVD, ‘On Talking to Myself’, iimura discusses the ‘video-reality’ of offscreen sound recorded and the ‘silent voice’ of the movement of lips ‘so that the viewer perceives the sentence repeating itself’. What he calls ‘synch out of synch’ is the effect of a time lag between the visual depiction of an onscreen speaker and the words that come from that person’s mouth. ‘What I am trying to achieve in the piece is a communication (sender-receiver within the self) separated by function but integrated by its perception’ writes iimura.

In a chatty May 1979 letter to iimura from David B. Allison, Derrida’s translator calls iimura’s project an ‘almost preposterous ambition...its beauty seems to be in a kind of vertigo, an infinitization of replications, mirrorings, suspected detours, half-forgotten and neglected stops, arrests, reconfirmations and confusions’. Allison goes on to liken its ‘Godbergian variation’ to Bach choral music, to Alain Resnais’ movie ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ and Terry Riley’s serial musical composition ‘In C’. One hopes that the enthusiastic Mr. Allison now has a copy of Takahiro iimura’s DVD. He will find that philosophy plus minimal technique and imagery have produced a cohesive, compact and well-assembled document of an artist’s long fascination with what to him has been Derrida’s most ‘epiphanic’ text.