Kūsou/空相's interactive audio-visual art installation melds calligraphy, music, and multimedia
Immersive Powell Street Festival experience plays with ideas of meaning, emptiness, and harmony
Two different stills from the animated Kūsou/空相, which draws on Japanese calligraphy.
Kūsou/空相 screens at the Anvil Centre Theatre from July 28 through August 3 as part of the Powell Street Festival. The artistic team hosts an opening talk at 6:30 pm on July 28. During the Powell Street Festival on July 30 at 3:45 pm at the Firehall Arts Centre, another talk with the artists is hosted by Giorgio Magnanensi, artistic director of Vancouver New Music.
THE NEW IMMERSIVE audiovisual installation Kūsou/空相 brings together not just ancient and cutting-edge-contemporary art forms, but artists who live across the Pacific Ocean from each other.
While Japanese calligraphy morphs in a hallucinatory way on a huge 20-metre-wide screen, a live computer-generated soundscape of electronically altered flute surrounds audiences.
The premiere tomorrow at New Westminster’s Anvil Centre as part of the Powell Street Festival marks the culmination of two years of work between four artists— two of them in Vancouver, and two of them in Japan. (The New Media Gallery and Formscape Arts Society have also partnered on the major project.)
“We do not present any story to the audience—we only present rather abstract visual concepts,” explains soundscape artist and interactive system developer Yota Kobayashi. “I want the audience to make sense of them. We only provide the abstract building blocks with which the audience can create a unique reality in their mind.”
He worked online on the project with acclaimed Tokyo-based calligrapher Aiko Hatanaka and video artist Ryo Kanda. Here in town, he spent hours recording small phrases of music—more than 650 of them—by flutist Mark Takeshi McGregor.
Kobayashi explains he then feeds those sampled bits into a computer program. “It is going to recompose the soundscape, generating it in real time,” he says.
The artist explains that the main concept behind the piece is “ku”—the age-old Zen Buddhist concept of emptiness. “Basically it says that everything is empty, but that doesn't mean there's nothing—just that reality only becomes reality only through our imagination,” Kobayashi explains.
The Japanese “kanji” characters of calligraphy that Hanataka employs here lend themselves perfectly to that concept, he adds, because they are not just aesthetically beautiful as pictographs, but they carry meaning that can be interpreted widely by different people.
“So, for example, if we present the character for ‘virtue’ to the audience, what does it mean to them?” the artist says. “It’s different for everyone. If someone thinks theirs is the only version of virtue in this world then there will be conflict. We'd like to create a harmonious universe, a world where those diverse phenomena can coexist harmoniously. That’s what we want to represent in the artwork: to accept that there can be many versions, and everyone has their own meaning or belief or awareness.”
In other words, Kūsou/空相 creates a kind of communal peace and acceptance. And the calligraphic forms that fluidly appear and disappear in front of your eyes onscreen, seemingly taking shape out of particles of luminous dust, are “empty” vessels for each person’s interpretation. (That echoes the computer-generated sounds, also conjured from the fragments of McGregor’s ethereal flute-playing.)
“Anything we can see on the screen within a few seconds becomes empty,” says Kobayashi, who invites visitors to move in the space, coming closer and shifting farther from the screen to see its different effects. (See the video below for an idea.)
“They are composed of tens of millions of particles–and each particle doesn't mean anything on its own, but when they swarm together for a few seconds, they have meaning," Kobayashi says. "Then a few seconds later, they become meaningless again. And you go, ‘Wait a minute. What was that? Did I imagine that?’”
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