Video
Duration: 3:42min

Shooting Session for Sight Seeing #12

A Few Minutes of Sight Seeing #12 from Futoshi Miyagi on Vimeo.

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A Few Minutes of Sight Seeing #11

Video
Duration: 3:12min

Shooting Session for Sight Seeing #11

A Few Minutes of Sight Seeing #11 from Futoshi Miyagi on Vimeo.

OSSU

A magazine about men, from Tokyo, Asia. The first issue will be launched at THE TOKYO ART BOOK FAIR 2011, July 16th to 18th.

OSSU are:
Toru Kirishima
Futoshi Miyagi
Eiki Mori
Hiroyuki Takenouchi

with
Fumiko Imano
Hanayo
TwoTom

More info soon!

There seems to be a striking similarity between the nature of the video-chat and the pseudo-privacy that a captain of a warship, with his authority, creates on the deck in Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book Epistemology of the Closet, argues that:

“The audience…has itself an audience, or the more unsettling incipience of one”

In such an unreliable and skeptical realm, is it possible to negate the unsettling nature of that incipient audience, and to generate a firm connection with an other?

A few years ago, I started the project “You were there in front of me”, which is a portrait project done using video chat programs. I contacted people from all over the world, scheduled time for the shoot. At the arranged time we started the chat, then with my handheld SLR, I photographed him displayed on the screen of my laptop. I was curious to see what sort of relationship woud develop there. However, what I realized through the process was such a simple fact that we (I and the other) can never meet each other’s gaze. The other only seems to see me.

Matthew was one of the models who sat for the project. More by accident than by planning, I kept photographing him in a long term we became friends. Yet, regardless of how many photographs I shot and printed, the virtual images remained virtual. Web camera, screen, SLR, Photoshop, Printer, those layers of processes only adds to its original un-realness. Plus there were those uncanny presence of the incipient audience: information on the web, possible censorship and leakage of the personal, the computer itself in front of me, and people I encounter in everyday life. I could not see him clearly. I was not sure of the shape of his hands, color of his eyes. Yet once in a while, some seemingly irrelevant parts – an orange peel, flute, mug cup, wall paper- speak to me and reveal things about him.

The works in “A Cup Of Tea” are my various attempts against those incipient audience. The attempts to hide from them, to play with them, and to accept them. Many of them seem to be failures. But there are times that I was certain to establish a firm connection. It was a thin spider’s thread, yet the thread was as strong as to clear the presence of the incipient audience.

Installation Views:
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I have been doing a photographic project “You were there in front of me”, in which I photograph people, most of whom strangers, men, whom I met online, on the other side of the screen, while interacting via skype. I have done many shoots but increasingly felt the project failing. The images lacked some sort of an essence of the photographed or the relationship that took place during the shoot. The sitters were gone, really gone, once we said goodbye and close the skype window, as if they never existed. Nobody seemed real, and it really felt artificial.

I photographed Matthew back in June and the shooting session was quick. I felt really awkward, because he was rather quiet. The photographs were ok, but didn’t satisfy me. I emailed the photos to him and he said they made him smile. That was it, I thought.

Then he popped up again, started talking to me on skype quite casually. I found it strange at first but our relationship started there and continued. He was in London, I was in Tokyo. We talked. I am not talkative, so often we fell silent, but we continued our little chat sessions. And I kept photographing him.This was the first time that I felt something palpable taking shape out of this project.

Looking back at the images of him, I found that there were a few things that caught my attention, some things that I never really paid attention to, or some things that are irrelevant to him or his personality. They took hold of me, speaking truthfully about him, like Barthes’ Punctum in Camera Lucida, “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”. They are still part of images that are produced virtually and remain artificial, yet they represent him for me, and these things holds the images together. It felt like things caught on a net, on a web. Not a trap but an inviting structure that held me yet doesn’t blind me, gave me images that are truer than falsely photographs. Thin and fragile, yet more substantial than photographs, they softly catch me and remind me of his actual presence. The presence I never really felt physically.

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Size: A4
Xerox paper

Some people carry photographs of the people they love. The photographs are sometimes folded, torn, or stained. But thfey seem more significant than ordinary, clean photographs. How long does it take to make such a beautiful wallet photograph?

There was a big tree in the back garden of Matthew’s house. I photographed the tree several times. The tree was strangely attractive to me, and I wanted to carry the photograph of the tree in my wallet, which I did for one month. A month later, the photograph became to possess a look that was a bit historical.

But the folds and seams can be flattened and the photograph may become an ordinary photograph again.

Video
Duration: 5min

Hot water was turning into tea. Someone was calling me over Skype. But it was not answered. After the third attempt, the caller gave up. The tea was now lukewarm.

Not My Cup Of Tea (2010), Excerpt from Futoshi Miyagi on Vimeo.

Video
Duration: 3min

iLife’s GarageBand has a function called Music Typing, with which you can play music by typing the computer keyboard. The arrangement of the keys are nothing like that of a piano, and you can only make sound of one octave.

I composed an email using Music Typing. The screen is filled with intangible codes. The text is not a writing, but a music; the Air from Bach’s Goldberg Variations.The email does not make any sense. What recipient get is poorly played, monotonous Air.

What I Meant Was (2010), Excerpt from Futoshi Miyagi on Vimeo.