Voices of Aliveness 2012
Masaki Fujihata
The world today is full of sound and fury. Everywhere people are rife with angst over the present state of world affairs.
In the midst of all this, sometimes we just want to shout – without any particular objective, and with no clear reason.
What can we do about this? The project site at La Martiniere is a place for shouting, where people can shout into cyberspace,
and see/hear their experience documented on the Web. It is a collection of people's shouts. It is a sculpture of voices.
It is a "meta-monument" built of collective memory.
We will not stop shouting. We will continue to hold recording days every year. Voices of Aliveness is an ongoing project.
Voices of Aliveness invites people to ride a bicycle on a special path prepared exclusively
for this project called the "shouting circuit". The bicycles are equipped with a GPS recorder and a video camera. As
participants ride the bicycle, traces of their path and shouts will be transformed into cyberspace in the shape of
a ring. The collected rings from each participant will be compiled to form a tower-like "time tunnel" – a cyber tunnel
of collected shouting that extends toward the heavens.
The composer Yasuaki Shimizu who is collaborating on the project will arrange the recorded voices for the soundtrack.
The project bridges real space and cyberspace, or network space. The main concerns of the project are how we can express our life, our aliveness, our activity in cyberspace, and how we can document what we are doing as collective memories in digital format. The only way to tackle this problem is by designing a new medium, by expanding our creativity. Each person's participation, their "shout" is the key to connecting technology and memory.
Pioneer in the field of computer graphics and media art, a professor at Tokyo University of the Arts. His works, imbued with the special features unique to the newest technologies in media art, raised a variety of issues that had never emerged in earlier media of expression, and in the process Fujihata breathed fresh new life into art. The works and projects that are born from his unique philosophy and playful ideas are highly acclaimed both in Japan and abroad.
Composer and saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu is an insatiably inquisitive artist whose musical explorations range from classical to free improvisation. The work for which he is best known may be his groundbreaking interpretations of J.S. Bach. Prolific in recording and live performance since his virtuosic saxophone first attracted attention in the 1970s, he collaborates on video, multimedia and dance projects, as well as composing television and film music.
