TOKYO GEIDAI DIGITAL TWIN

The international hybrid symposium “A/R/P 2021” organised by the Graduate School of Global Art, was held on Saturday 2 and Sunday 3 October 2021.

For more information on the programmes, please visit the special website: https://arp.geidai.ac.jp/

Date and Time：October 2 (Sat.) – October 3 (Sun), 9:00-19:00
Venue：Tokyo University of the Arts, Senju Campus + Online
Organized by：The Graduate School of Global Arts (GA), Tokyo University of the Arts,Asia Art Research (Arts and Research in Asia/ARinA) Project, Yoshitaka Mori Lab
In collaboration with: Tokyo Geidai Asia Art Initiative(AAI), Tokyo Geidai Digital Twin

Archive of Keynote Speeches

Arts-Based Research-Based Art-B-R-B-A-B-R 
Performance: 感情の考古学 Archeology of Emotion

Professor Masayuki Okahara
Sociologist, Professor Keio University

What is ABR? And on that note, what is RBA?
Is it even an activity that can be described as anything in the first place?
Regardless, there is no harm in trying to trace its contours. Because many researchers are already talking about ABR in many places as if it were a discipline.
The idea is to see art and research as autonomous disciplines, and to link them together at some nexus. There is something to be gained by such a way of understanding, and we may glorify their autonomy. But on the other hand, we can think of the two̶art and research̶as the same event, and we may not need to think of them as autonomous. We may think autonomy is an illusion, but the mystery remains. We could also say that it is only conventions (institutions) that tell us different things about an event, and we can focus on the macro-politics and micro-politics of these conventions. Who has benefited from the division of the two?
Today, I would like to introduce Keio ABR, the ABR practice that I have been working on in my laboratory at Keio University.

Masayuki Okahara studied at the University of Munich, West Germany (majoring in theatre studies), and later specialized in the sociology of emotion and disability studies. After fieldwork on the lives of disabled people in the community and on sexuality, and on the sociology of emotion that enables emotional communication, I have been practicing arts-based research and performative sociology. In this context, in my lab, we create art workshops, video and performance works as a team. We also runs „Mita no ie” as an alternative space. “Arts-Based Research Practices in Sociology: Undergraduate and graduate degree education” with Alena Prusakova. (Kayoko Komatsu et al., Arts-Based Method in Education Research in Japan. Brill-Sense) 2022 . “Donʼt be afraid to be performative! Doing Performative Social Science at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan” (Kip Jones ed. Doing Performative Social Science: creativity in doing research and reaching communities. Taylor & Francis) 2022

Postcard, Archive and Home Video: On Forms of (Re-making) Memories

Dr. Lu Pan
Associate Professor & Undergraduate Programme Leader, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

In this talk, Pan Lu will share four groups of art projects she participated in between 2014 and 2021 in order to explore how art practice and academic research deal with the relationship between individual and collective memory, history and images. Picture Postcards from the Future (2014) and The Happiest Place on Earth (2020) are two sets of postcard installations created in different contexts (in collaboration with Bo Wang). Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017) is a two-channel video/installation that includes various visual archival and found image materials (in collaboration with Bo Wang). She will also share the research process of her most recent film (co-directed by Japanese artist Yu Araki) is titled Anachronic Chronicles: Voyages Inside/Out Asia, which is based on home videos from various parts of East Asia from the 1960s to 1990s.

PAN Lu is Associate Professor at Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She was visiting scholar and visiting fellow at the Technical University of Berlin (2008 and 2009), the Harvard-Yenching Institute (2011-2012), researcher in residence at Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (2016) and visiting scholar at Taipei National University of the Arts (2018). Pan is author of three monographs: InVisible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities (Bristol: Intellect, 2015), and her new book Image, Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Monuments in Greater China is published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Her films, co-directed with Bo Wang, include Traces of an Invisible City (2016), Miasma, Plants and Export Paintings (2017), which received Award for Excellence, 32nd Image Forum Festival, Tokyo, Japan, and Many Undulating Things (2019). Her most recent film (codirected with Yu Araki) is based on home videos from various parts of East Asia from the 1960s to 1990s. She was one of the curators of Kuandu Biennale, Taipei, 2018.

Immersive Architecture: Digital explorations and multimodal representations

Dr Simone Shu-Yeng CHUNG
Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore
CHUA Ming Hao, ZHU Shengbuwei
Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore

In an era where the virtual dimension increasingly overlaps with the real, and mixed reality is fast becoming the norm, the incorporation of digital tools and interpretive media for studying and communicating spatial phenomena is an inevitable progression. Rather than superficial engagement for its novelty value, we advocate novel ways of utilizing digital tools for architectural research and design ideations. Underpinning our studioʼs work is the role of space in narrative construction, and digital technology to the experience of space and place. Ultimately, space, or descriptions of space, serves as both context and referent. The digital medium therefore becomes the means to deliver a meticulously crafted immersive environment, or realize an artefact that provokes discourse. Identifying the appropriate translation media to convey research intentions and findings not only advances new forms and format of architectural representation and spatial experience but also forces us to question the ways we hitherto operate in our respective disciplines. They enrich the research-led approach adopted by artists and designers to gain new and different kinds of knowledge, and infuse a reflective dimension to their practices. In our case, cross-technology explorations constitute vital exercises in tactility and lateral thinking as much as they are utilized for structuring new experiences and subjectivities. Diverse lines of enquiry led to equally varied projects, such as Relativity 6, that postulate new design opportunities of an imminent future, or critique environmental perils allegorically as Death in Venice does.

Relativity 6
Presenter: CHUA Ming Hao, Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore
Inspired by M.C. Escherʼs optically-confounding Relativity (1953) and the perceptual embodied freedom afforded by VR technology, Relativity 6 (Chua Ming Hao and Victor Ang, 2020) investigates orbital architecture design requirements through a series of calibrated virtual simulacra of microgravity immersion experiments. With commercial space tourism on the horizon, 8 disorientation and confusion arising from omnidirectional travel and inhabitation in microgravity environments present new challenges for architectural proxemics that differ greatly from earthbound space planning conventions.

Death in Venice
Presenter: ZHU Shengbuwei, Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore
Death in Venice (Zhu Shengbuwei and Melissa Ong, 2020), an allegorical undertaking, associates the various crises plaguing Venice with evils represented as realms of the netherworld in Dante Alighieriʼs Inferno. The multimedia project captures the multiplicity of perspectives from the non-fictional Venice, an Odyssey (Robbins, 2020) using linear and interweaving representations, notations and spatial references. Through open-ended explorations, viewers create their own narratives and subjective meanings out of the disparate elements presented in the project.

Simone Shu-Yeng Chung is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. She holds a Ph.D. in Architecture and M.Phil. in Screen Media and Cultures from the University of Cambridge. Before pursuing academia, she practiced as a chartered architect in the UK after completing her architectural studies at the Architectural Association and the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. She has won several international fellowships such as the CCA Research Fellow in Architecture, Japan Foundation Asian Center fellowship and Rome Scholar in Architecture award.
Her research interests resides in the synergistic potential offered by visual and moving images to architecture and urban research, and issues concerning contemporary culture, conservation and intangible heritage in Asia. Publications include The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore (2020, Amsterdam University Press) co-edited with Mike Douglass, book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles on architectural and urban research and visual spatial studies. She is a curator for the Singapore pavilion to gather: The architecture of relationships at the 17th Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition (2021).
https://www.sde.nus.edu.sg/arch/staffs/simone-shu-yeng-chung-dr/

Monogatari, the Light -Travels to the Source of Pulsing Images

Dr. Itsushi Kawase
Visual Anthropologist & Associate Professor, National Museum of Ethnology

Storyteller: Dr. Itsushi Kawase
Sound Performer: Dr. Yushi Yanohara

Through an exploration of contemporary art installations, art museums, architecture, and sculptures found in Naoshima Island in the Seto Inland Sea, I have created an imaginary epic story entitled
“Monogatari, the Light.” (The Japanese word Monogatari means “story” or “narrative”). In this tale, Monogatari, the metaphor of a living image, travels through time and space, proliferates rapidly, and produces new Monogatari. It prolongs its life through being told by storytellers. This performance, based on epic storytelling with a sonic portrait of Monogatari, describes and emphasizes the imaginary
and creative aspects of Monogatari, which can travel across any existing borders or boundaries. The research of art installations and writing of the epic story “Monogatari, the Light” was originally conducted as a commissioned project in collaboration with Benesse Corporation.

Dr. Itsushi Kawase is an anthropologist born in Gifu, Japan. His fields of interests are visual anthropology, ethnographic films and ethnopoetics. Since 2001, he has been researching hereditary singer-poets in northern Ethiopia. Kawaseʼs films have been screened at major international ethnographic film festivals. In recent years, he has actively published poems and novels based on his anthropological fieldworks. He has also participated in poetry readings and performances incorporating street sounds from Africa. He is currently an associate professor at the National Museum of Ethnology/Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan. He has taught as a guest professor at the University of Hamburg (2013), the University of Bremen (2014, 2016), Shandong University (2016), Mekelle University (2017), Addis Ababa University (2018), etc.
https://trajectoria.minpaku.ac.jp/
http://www.itsushikawase.com/anthro-film_lab/