two kinds of tents

2 done, only another 27 left to go.

Yamanote Line platform jingles

I swear I was looking for a font when I came across this site with sound files of all the jingles played just before Yamanote trains depart from the station.

Here are a few tasters:

Meguro (clockwise)
Shinagawa (clockwise)
Takadanobaba (anticlockwise)

I don’t know why yet, but I’m sure this will come in useful one day!

unexpected Asakusa

Battling for air amongst all the other tourists, I tried to look at things a bit differently (or to shoot from the hip and not look at all).

Returning to the images a few weeks later, these are my unexpected photos of Asakusa’s Sensō-ji and Nakamise-dori.

JMap

When I first went to Japan I had no concept of where I was geographically other than “somewhere to the left of Tokyo”.

When I went to Japan the second time, I had no concept of where I was geographically other than being slightly savvy with the metro map.

After going to Japan for a third time I decided to plot the places I had been on a map. See the full interactive version here: http://npugh.co.uk/jmap

line up!

Walk to work: but very slowly and without getting out of turn.

the sound of watching

A week or two ago I posted an incomplete post about invigilator: Tokyo.

Well, I’m back in the UK now and sorting through all my documentation from the trip to Japan.

I’ve uploaded a few images to Flickr. There’s a slideshow here, but the pages on Flickr include captions giving more detail about each image.

but I was a bit wary about taking too many photos during the invigilation. I think it’s just a little bit too intimidating for a project that’s so much about how people react to subtleties within a space.

So, as an experiment with alternative forms of documentation, here’s a sound recording we made of the invigilation:

asakusa

For the last few days I’ve been staying in a ryokan in Asakusa: somewhere my friends tell me is very old style Japan.

I don’t think much of the view from my room.

However, on the plus side I’m about 20 seconds’ walk from Kaminari dori and Sensoji temple. I battled the crowds on Sunday morning, but by far prefer the place at night when it has room to breathe.

yaribi

After some serious Googling for artist-led projects in and around Tokyo, I ended up following a link to the Yaribi gallery. As is often the case in these situations, I’m following a link from an English-language site to a Japanese one, so I tend to get most of my information from the link rather than the site itself. In this case:

Yaribi is a little wooden hut constructed illegally on the roof of the painting department of Tama University by a number of students. They organise exhibitions in it. …The structure will stay on the roof for a while, and has the support of a number of professors. I suggested they perhaps involve curating and critical studies students as well as artists, to try create a broader public platform. Anyway, it is wonderful to see such initiatives in the normally rather quiet and reserved spaces of art schools.

All the universities here are just closing down for their Summer vacation so I thought I’d missed an opportunity to visit Yaribi, but fortunately they had two Open Campus days just at the time when I was staying at a friend’s house close by.

The campus is on a hillside on what I assume is the edge of Hashimoto. The buildings are that Eastern Asian concrete type of institutional architecture that I somehow simultaneously find quite uplifting but also incredibly bland. Hmmm.

Anyway, I finally tracked down the East painting building and the Yaribi rooftop.

Thanks to the language barrier again, I’m really not in a position to be able to say much about either the show or the organisational set-up but as far as I can make out there was previously a more ramshackle construction on the site that was made more solid in the early months of this year.

Thanks to some sheets of hardboard, some scaffolding, a website and a few judiciously placed tarpaulins, Yaribi seemed to me to be a really viable exhibition space. There are quite a large number of staff (a mix of current and graduated students?) and, judging from their website, a busy programme.

I’m really excited that something like this is happening, although I’m not really sure how autonomous it is and it’s still very much within the ‘safe zone’ of an art university (and probably within the students’ own department at that). I’d love to see more of this Outside, both in Japan and in Brum.

Could the use of scaffolding lend itself to a modular approach and a space that could be quite mobile? …or is it the semblance of something permanent that gives this project its strength?

sandwiched

Over the last week I’ve been able to cobble together a couple of fairly respectable sandwichboards that I intend to use to mark out an area under the watchful eye of a group invigilation.

It required an interesting combination of tools and materials from Meg’s studio and things like tweezers and a compass that I have in my rucksack.

(just to put things to scale, the table is about a foot high…)

Finding people to work with for the invigilation is proving much more difficult so, for the time being, the boards remain blank and the red t-shirts un-worn.

13 galleries

18/07/2007

Takashima, Sato, Yamamoto Gendai, Kodama, SCAI the Bath House, Muramatsu, Nantenshi, Yamaguchi, INAX, Humanite, Koyanagi, Natsuka, Grafica.

My feet hurt.