2018

December 18th

Mediating Urban Space: Video Hiroba’s Search for Public Space post-1970

Nina Horisaki-Christens, Ph.D. Candidate in Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

In Japan, artists only began to articulate video as a medium distinct from television and other moving image media from around late 1971 in spite of the technology having been developed in Japan and made available to the Japanese consumer market as early as 1967. This time lag has been attributed to problems of funding, accessibility, and the structure of the Japanese media system in research to date. While acknowledging these conditions, my research focuses on how Video Hiroba’s approach to video, and the discourse they helped form, responded to, and attempted to intervene within its social context. Such conditions include the dramatic development of mass media and media theory in 1960s Japan, greater restrictions on public space following a decade of public protests, and architectural debates regarding the nature and viability of the hiroba (public square).

This talk will draw from a chapter that examines Video Hiroba’s approach to urban space as a series of social and physical structures that are in constant flux. I will address two main threads of experimentation in Video Hiroba’s production. The first is a series of collaborative works that adopt an international discourse of media activism exemplified by publications like Guerilla Television and Radical Software. Video Hiroba adapted these approaches to address localized urban communities as communications networks, employing video as a new method of communication in attempts to invert structures of authority that intersected with machi zukuri movements. The second type of work I will address includes both collaborative and individual works that trace routes through urban space, creating performative anti-representations of urban space—from performative picnics to telephone-mediated landscape paintings—that attempt to highlight and harness the contingency of urban formations. Through both these performative and activist threads I contend that, contrary to the common assertion that post-1970s art, including video, withdraws from dealing with the public in favor of an articulation of the personal, Video Hiroba served as a site to explore media space as a translation of urban space. It thus created new “public” spaces ostensibly free from the hierarchies of traditional authority structures.