Could you shortly explain essential issues and motives which are characteristic for your artistic practice? (as for someone who never heard about you). And if possible – can you try to describe how they (un)fit with present Japanese artistic context?
I have been involved in the radioart that I called without the separation between "radio" and "art". This is the art concerning electromagnetic radiation from radio waves to brain waves and even to X-rays. In other words, the material (ὕλη) of radioart is airwaves and electromagnetic waves including lights and sounds. What I differ it from "radio art" is that the latter has a limitation defining itself within the area of sound art and arts using radio receiver. Although there is a term "transmission art", radioart is not limited in transmission but also receiving. I have no idea if radioart is fit or unfit to the present Japanese artistic context, but in my experience I could say that most of major museums tend to be too afraid of breaking the law of airwaves and to be reluctant to dare to start up such an event even if it used only a tiny transmitter. Some kind of stigma against airwaves might exist. There has been a notorious history of repression against clandestine communications.
Your description of what is the material of radioart is pretty broad but i also remember that you mentioned that our concept of waves is somehow narrow. Can you add in what sense? I guess a mathematical and physical models are shomehow sufficient for such a description but maybe there was some phenomenological interpretation in you mind...
I wanted to talk about the conventional definition of airwaves in radio art. It is considered as the airwaves of radio broadcasting such as HF, VHF, UHF and VLF. Also these categorized airwaves are mainly for receiving rather than transmitting. My proposal is to try such distinctions and to first consider them as a wholistic stream of electromagnetic fields. You mentioned phenomenology. The point of phenomenology is to let phenomena free (Zur Sachen selbst!). The present conceptualization of airwaves distort the airwaves itself.
What is an importance or what kind of role plays a τεχνη in your work. How is it connected with and idea of understandibility of technology? What is a meaning of using hands (or whole body) in your radio performances for you?
In terms of the relationship between τέχνη and technology, I was influenced by Martin Heidegger. According to his interpretation, τέχνη used to mean a handwork just like kneading of pottery. As it was organized and developed, it had a logic as "technology". I have been interested in this interwoven tradition of handwork and more "advanced" technology especially in electronics. Also, hands are the part of our body and at the same time are the whole of our body. When Kazuo Ohno (1906-2010) a great Butoh dancer was unable to move freely because of his back problems and Alzheimer's disease, his later expression was hands dance that he moved only his hands but were no mambo jumbo of a senile man but the impressive work. In my argument, the electronic technology erases our body. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are the most obvious example. Culturally, people tend to go without their body whatever they do today. Digitization is a erasing process of it. In fact, digit means finger and computer simplifies our body up to fingers and might go more without even fingers. In this sense, hands are the last island of our body. In my radioart performance using my hands, I have been testing how our body are reconstructed or deconstructed or hyper-constructed. This has a lot to do with the possibility of android and the end of human beings.
And let me add that I perceive your way of performing in a sense of using your body and hands as a kind of material filter which is bending/regulating waves. It is like „here I am, here is my body“ which is doing something important during performance. In this point of a view I see it as a contraposition to that digitalization-body-erasing process. Is this plausible interpretation?
Our body can resist and schild airwaves. At the sametime, it is a transmitting-receiving material. Our body action (hands movements in my case) changes various thresholds and levels that I could say resistance, capacitance, and inductance by their extended conceptuality from the electronic term. As a motive of my radioart performance, I have been trying to play with airwaves to emancipate the conventional thresholds of airwaves. Play means let my body and airwaves to be free as they are. If my body conventionally belongs to "homo faber", I would like to shift it to be "homo ludens". Digitalization-body_erasing process would be in this process.
And let me also add that very important aspect of your performances for me is that you are building/soldering an instrument right in front of an audience. This is important artistic gesture espetially in nowadays context – I mean our daily contxt when we are using technology as a black-boxes. Here I see an analogy with livecoding when performers are developing codes which are observable for audience. But you developed your approach separately and earlier. How it happened for you that you have decided to include that instrument-building aspect to the whole performance?
For me, performance art is always to show the process not only of changes of body action-condition but also making something. So, I have been thinking that the less sophisticated the better. If you found any separation in my erlier performance, it would be due to the policy and management of the space I used. There were not so much chances that I was able to show the whole process although I wanted to do like Robert Wilson did.
What is your attitude to radioarts manifesto (http://www.kunstradio.at/TEXTS/manifesto.html) and what is the main difference in comparison with your radioart manifesto?
I respect Heidi Grundmann and Robert Adrian in their pioneering work of his experiment of communication arts and her creation of Kunstradio. Their manifest " TOWARD A DEFINITION OF RADIO ART" is written mainly from the perspective of radio listener. I agree with what they wanted to say. But it didn't talk about transmission. I just tried to talk about radioart from the perspective of transmission. Also, I was talking as a performer of the praxis. In my experience, transmission is prior to listening. Even to listen might be a transmission without which no listening can't work. We first transmit something to an object and receive the echo just like a sonar and radar system. It is quite natural among bats, isn't it?
The output of your performance could be perceived in reference to noise music. Is noise just unnecessary outcome of performing method you developed or does it mean something more for you?
Now that noise has been considered as a music, I have to be very careful about the fact that my sound could be perceived in reference to noise music. Although the sound is socondary for me, I could compromise my sound to be perceived as "noise music" because noise was not a music yet. Radioart can be a music, but I wanted to do over the music or differently. Already John Cage extended the music to the "silence". Is it the end of music? But when we radicalize his argument of silence, he can't remain to be the music. I think he should be reconsidered as a radioartist. I should learn from him more in refer to your question too.
If I understand well there was a lot of utopic exceptances concerning micro radio scene. But if micro radio paradise ended with institutionalizing and with appearance of internet what are present and functional ideas which can we use or be inspired with? (Can term "micro" be comprehended in ethical sense as a kind of voluntary humbleness? Or maybe - can we comprehend micro approaches as a possibility to keep up a kind of ontological diversity? I mean a diversity which is not after certain time converted into some "global diversity". Do you see some present examples of "molecular revolution" nowadays?)
I learned the term and concept of 'micro' from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno ("Mikrologie"), Carlo Ginzburg ("microstoria") and Deleuze/Guattari ("micro revolution" and "revolution moleculaire"). In each cases, there were their own fields such as literary criticism, historical studies, and psychoanalysis and politico-cultural studies. When I was involved in micro radio, the micro was the degree comparing with the of massmediatic radio and mainstream radio station. But this degree is not the size of quantity. Not all little media is micro media as well as not all large media can't be denied. It should be the quality difference. So even among big radio stations, there could be micro radio just like Kunstradio is. Actually, even in Mini FM station in the 80s, Japan, there were a lot of stations which were just a small size of mainstream radio. So "micro" is the direction of our praxis and you could say as an ontology. That doesn't exist as an institutional format. If micro radio was utopic because it exists nowhere. This ontology prefers diversity (micronization) to integration and homogenization. As micro radio is institutionalized, performer of micro radio has to escalate this ontology. My direction from Mini FM to radioart is an attempt to do so. I have no enough knowledge of micro revolution today, but I think that it appears everywhere when qualitative micronization is going on.
Yes, for example I noticed that there is a lot of small home based art projects running around Tokyo and it reminded me kind of reaction to commercialized/unified culture and society. There are also some analogies between czech underground movement in 70s and 80s – only the totalitarian system is different.
Yup, this is not a question but still maybe you can add something here if you have any idea :)
I think it would be one reason, but there should be more complicated matters. The difference is that there is still the Emperor-system in Japan. This is very different from the Western authoritarianism or totalitarianism. As you know, Kafka provided the excellent description of the hyper-bureaucracy where the top of the system is invisible. In a sense, the Japanese Emperor-system might be similar to it. And therefore critical reading of Kafka should bridge Czech and Japan in understanding the similarity and the difference. In definition Japanese Emperor is not a person but a symbol as you could find it in the Constitution. In stead of that, only a person of the "genuine" emperor family and only a male can become the emperor. This symbolic and racial system appears explicitly and implicitly as the time goes. In fact, from the pattern of family and marriage have been following the model of the emperor's family. Today, the industry needs a kind of pluralism and diversity. Thus the emperor system is less explicit. But look at every single facet of group activity and person-to-person attitude, you will find some kind of invisible homogenous monotonous air in them. The problem is that due to this "air" even "micro" units can't become real alternative to the emperor system. The real subculture is difficult to be visible but most of "subcultures" came from outside especially from the US. If you carefully look at such a "micro" social unit, you will find a kind of small Emperor (Tenno) in it. Also, racism and sexism are sill the basis of Japanese society. But I don't think such factors could be changed by introducing some sort of democracy in the sense of East-West European way. Without structural change, they will continue to exist. That's why I emphasize micro politics. Without continuous change of subtle aspects of our everyday life and micro-inner aspects in every person, nothing could be changed. In this sense, I think that in the last three decades mobile phone and the internet have changed such "micro" aspects far more than any kind of ideology and thought. But the next of "electronic individualism" is still not clear.
But back to specific terms you are working with. Except term „micro“ we can find term „polymorphous space“ as a title of your webpage. How are these two influence each other/work together?
As a concept, I prefer "polymorphous" to "micro". Apart from "polymorphism" in the computer science, I used this first in the late 70s in my conscious of Marshall McLuhan and Johann W. von Goethe. McLuhan used this term for the diverse tendency of coming new age of electronics. Also, this term reminded me Goethe's "Morphologia". In short, I would like to express by this term a structurally and minutely diverse and interwoven situation and condition.
What sort of questions do you ask yourself in recent time?
I am still investigating (as I told you before) how people conceptualized airwaves before the age of radio and electronics.