Books

CDs

Events/Exhibits

Film/Video

by Takahiko Iimura
Published by Heure Exquise!, France, 1999.
Languages: : English and Japanese
Interface: Mac and PC, 640 X 480 screen.
ISBN: 4-901181-02-5.
Reviewed by Fred Andersson, Ulvsbygatan 29 (6), 654 64 Karlstad, Sweden. E-mail: konstfred@hotmail.com


As a conceptualist and a minimalist, the Japanese filmmaker and video-artist Takahiko (Taka) Iimura might seem to represent some kind of anti-film. From this point of view, it's maybe not surprising that he has busied himself during the last years with making CD-ROMs and a very nice website (http://www2.gol.com/users/iimura/Front.html) - primarily with the purpose of presenting and re-working earlier works. Not surprising, because as a conceptualist Iimura cares for flexible mediums in which he can present his ideas, and less for filmic or videographic experiences in an essentialist or aesthetic sense. At the very same time, his ideas are always inseparable from the medium itself.

The CD-ROM "Interactive AIUEONN" is about the idea of letting six facial (or oral) expressions represent six sounds (namely A, I, U, E, O, N), and to construct a game which plays on the differences between the visual and the aural/oral, between English and Japanese. He did this for the first time in 1982, in a video installation at the Victor Video Center in Tokyo. In 1993 he presented a new version of the same video in the Kirin Plaza, Osaka. The present CD-ROM is a re-working of this later version, with it's grotesque distortions of the artist's face when he pronounces the sounds. The first five sounds, A, I, U, E and O, are of course the japanese vowels. The last one, N, is the only Japanese consonant with which a word can end.

The CD-ROM consists of three parts. The first one is the Demo. Here is shown, very slowly, six digital video-clips with the artist's distorted face(s) pronouncing the sounds. Each sound/clip has its own background color: A is red, I is yellow, U is green, E is blue, O is white, N is black. In this way, every sound becomes associated with a grotesque face ("feature") and a color. When shown in Western or Japanese phonetic script (katakana or hiragana), they are colored in the same way. In the second, "interactive" part of the CD, one is however supposed to alter the relations between pictures/colors and sounds. If I choose the picture/color A, then I can't choose the sound A to accompany this picture. I have to choose another sound. Depending upon my choice, the relations between all the other sounds and pictures are then automatically re-grouped and re-played in a new order. This is a very simple but also striking statement about the arbitrariness of semiotic relations.

Any exact phonetic correspondence between a sound and a written symbol is of course purely illusory and conventional. Likewise, anyone claiming the possibility of exact translation from one language to another is unlikely to have any experience of foreign languages. If I would write this in Swedish, I would never be able to express exactly the same content or sense. Taka Iimura's experience of living in the gap between two very different languages and semiotic systems, English and Japanese, is expressed in the third part of the CD which is a game of words for two players. When you play it, you use the six faces/colors to construct Japanese words. The words have to start with the vowel A. Once a word is formed, the scoring is made according to word length, and the word is shown in Hiragana or Katakana (phonetic script), in Kanji (ideograms) and in English. This CD is both simple and tricky - and also a funny lesson in Japanese. My four-year old son loves it, especially the crazy features. I guess that's the best credit an artist can get.

(See also my LDR review of Imura's catalogue Film et VidÚo.)

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