THIS IS A CAMERA WHICH SHOOTS THIS
As a pioneer of Japanese experimental film and video Takahiko Iimura has been working in film since 1960 and with video since 1970. He is also a widely established international artist, and has had many exhibitions in Japan, the United States, and Europe. One of his early films, 'Onan', was awarded the Special Prize at the legendary Brussels International Experimental Festival in 1964. Recently he has also used the computer, publishing multimedia interactive CD-ROMs/DVDs combining video, text, graphics, and photos.
THIS IS A CAMERA WHICH SHOOTS THIS (1980) Two cameras and two monitors are placed facing each other a certain distance apart. There is a sentence on the wall between them: 'THIS IS A CAMERA WHICH SHOOTS THIS'. On the monitors the identical images of the camera are seen showing the real thing and the image side by side. The endless sentence is the textual equivalent of the endless video structure, a camera shooting another camera which shoots back at the first camera. In this virtual feedback process, the existing subject-object relationship prescribed by elementary logic becomes relativised. In Imura¹s words: an endless structure as the 'object' turns into the subject of the next sentence.
This is a Camera Which Shoots This (1980) reflects, in an unsurpassed way, Iimura's cultivated transnational postmodernity, at the same time radiating the traditional Japanese aesthetic concepts of wabi (= simplicity, silence) and sabi (= unobstrusive elegance). Slavko Kacunko, Closed Circuit Videoinstallations.
On the history and theory of media art, ZKM, Germany, 2004. Translated from the German by Caspar Stracke and Alena Williams.
On Sunday, March 20th at 8pm Takahiko Iimura will illuminate and discuss a selection of his own work at Artcinema OFFOFF, Begijhof Ter Hoye, Lange Violettestraat 237, 9000 Ghent
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