arrival and getting started

I arrived in Japan shortly before a typhoon and a large earthquake although fortunately did not feel the effects of either (though by the time we saw a patch of blue sky on Monday morning it was notable enough to take a photo of it!)

Having sorted out communications I’m now in the slow process of sussing out how what I want to do fits in and around what everyone else here is doing. The schedule’s having to be quite flexible, but that’s fine ‘cos there’s always something interesting to do.

Yesterday I went to Megumi’s studio where she’s helping Linda produce a large fibre-glass sculpture made from mouldings of a classin Celica car they negotiated access to.

Needless to say I wasn’t really prepared for a day grinding glass fibres so me and my t-shirt and shorts were entrusted with documentation duties. I also had a chance to start making some props for a planned invigilation I’m hoping to do.

So, Meg and Linda were all togged-up with safety gear and trying not to inhale or wear too many nasty substances and all I had to do was figure out how the hand saw worked…

Twenty Jaffa Cakes

A 6 stanza themed renga form collaboratively written with Paul Conneally.

Form devised by poet Gary Gay.

Twenty Jaffa Cakes

a rengay

twenty jaffa cakes
a mistake to try and take
in her hand luggage

a slow and silent pat down
from the woman on gate one

stilettoes x-rayed
but her carbon footprint is
not for scrutiny

a hugely fat man
asks for the front port aisle seat
to rest his bad leg

smile and permanent jetlag
slept in uniform again

deep into morning
i finish my book somewhere
over africa

paul conneally and nikki pugh
July 12th 2007

My plane leaves at 8.30 tomorrow morning. I arrive at Narita on Saturday morning and from there I have to negotiate my way to Yokosuka. After a week or so in various locations around Kanagawa-ken I dive into Tokyo for about a fortnight.

Yamanote Stories

Checking the feasibility of telling the SoPG: Yamanote stories whilst travelling in between stations on the Yamanote line.

SoPG: Yamanote, revisited

With one thing and another I’ve been spending a lot of time recently working on different aspects of the Sites of Potentiality Guidebooks series.

As well as developing projects to keep pushing the format in new directions, I’ve been looking at how best to present last year’s Yamanote Line project.

Although most of my documentation at the time was done via photography (and a couple of dozen of rather nice tickets – man! I love that silky black finish on the back!) I really don’t want it to turn into some sort of photography project.

So far I have 2 possible solutions…

The first is a website style format where selected photos are presented alongside bilingual word-pictures of each walk. It’s good in that it goes some way to convey the sense of journey and experience, but I feel it’s still quite a passive mode of consumption.

I’m carefully describing them as website style because I’d choose to display them under very particular conditions where I can control the appearance. Normally I’d be a lot more inclusive with my web design, but this is me in prima donna control freak mode. So there.

To aid the feedback process though, I’ve uploaded the pages for the first day’s walks so you can have a look here. A change-log can be found at the bottom of this page.

The pages were designed to be viewed in Firefox (available here) with all navigation bars removed, in full screen mode and at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768px.

[Internet Explorer does its own thing and adds in a load of visual elements I don’t want ranging from vertical scrollbars through to blue borders around images. I’m PC-based, but a quick test in Firefox for Mac suggests there may be slight issues with variations in the positioning of the text. YMMV]

Here’s a screenshot of what I see. (Click for larger version)

Solution 2 is performance based:

The time taken to do a complete circuit of the Yamanote line by train is about an hour. With 29 stations that’s a couple of minutes per station. Or, alternatively, a couple of minutes per walk.

During off-peak times, I think a carriage on a Yamanote line train would make the perfect venue for a presentation of the project: in sync with the different locations as myself and my audience (a mixture of pre-arranged and incidental) travel from station to station.

Here’s a draft version of how it might sound…

Change-log:

We shall not cease from exploration…

queue-jumping

In preparing various proposals etc over the last few weeks, I looked again at some of my photos from SoPG: Yamanote Line.

In particular, these ones of queues outside a restaurant in Ōsaki:

I’ve resolved that next time I get a chance to work in Japan, I’m going to develop a project that relates to the time spent in these queues. I’m sure it could be a good forum for some exchanges. Being in the queue could be the the raison d’être for being in the queue. Perhaps others in the queue could recommend other good queues to be in…

(non-verbal) communication

I promise you these document/augment a conversation that followed entirely logical thought-processes from one topic to another:

[non stick people drawn by the rather talented Orie Inoue]

panpipe moods

A recently rediscovered gift from the man in the toyshop.

I’m not sure if this is a character from popular mythology, or indeed whether the pipe is a musical instrument or a flame-thrower…

analogy for current levels of productivity

Volume 13

Volume 13 started off with sculptor Atsuo Okamoto: he agreed to fill in a page of the sketchbook and pass it on to another artist; I agreed to keep a small section of the artwork “Volume of Lives” with me until I die. Anything’s fair game in the world of artistic collaborations!

Volume 5

Orie Inoue: Is she a fashion designer? Is she an animator? Is she an illustrator?

You decide… (but probably it’s all of the above and more!)