ICC
Openspace2015
works
"Toposcan / Ireland 2013"
2013
TAKATANI Shiro

photo: FUJISAWA Takuya

Eight 16:9 monitors are lined up and connected horizontally. The images on each monitor are fragments that together make up one long horizontal landscape picture. Within that picture, a video image the size of one monitor slowly moves from one end to the other and back as if passing through the row of monitors. While the image moves forward, a section the size of 1 pixel at its head is gradually stretched into colored horizontal lines that seem to be coming out of the adjoining picture fragment. At the same time, as the image moves forward, 1 pixel-sized rows at the very end of it are fixed one after another to complete a still image as soon as the image has reached one end of the display, resulting in what may be seen as a trace visualizing the time of the camera's locomotion.

The work thus combines three different visual formats - colored horizontal lines that ultimately form landscape pictures; traveling footage of landscapes; and still images that appear as a result of the footage's locomotion - to present a visual experience different from the methods of spatial recognition of the human sense of vision, and of the camera as an optical device for grasping space based on it.

When trying to grasp a space by the methods of scanners or copy machines that translate two-dimensional objects into lines, for example, the result is an image without depth and vanishing point, quite different from a pictorial view based on linear perspective. This is at once a capture of the world by means other than the human eye.


Collection of Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
Programming: FURUDATE Ken

TAKATANI Shiro Profile
Born 1963. Member of the artist group dumb type since their formation in 1984, where he has been generally in charge of visual parts. Since the late 1990s, he has been involved with the group's direction, while at the same time focusing also on his activities as a solo artist, creating conceptual visualizations of optical devices and mechanisms such as "frost frames" (1998) and "optical flat" (2000), as well as the performance works "Camera Lucida" (2008) and "CHROMA" (2012) among others. Also frequently collaborates with other artists.
Past Exhibition / Event

Channel ICC


Interview with the artist is available in Podcast "Channel ICC."
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