About the artwork

This is a presentation device of light using 25 prefabricated music stands arranged in a 5 x 5 grid. It was created for the Japan Today exhibition held at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark) in 1995. The installation toured four Nordic countries before being exhibited at the Floating Garden Observatory of Umeda Sky Building in Osaka. It portrays the modern urban landscape brimming with a variety of symbols through the brightening and dimming of light sources and objects placed on music stands. The subtitle, A Semiotic Field in a Modal City, embodies the notion that urban spaces are not only filled with roads and buildings, but are also
full of a variety of texts and symbols, suggesting that the generation and disappearance of these symbols create the landscapes within our consciousness. The piece was restored for this exhibition nearly 30 years later, with the help of Tsukihashi Osamu and Okochi Manabu, who at the time were members of Hara Laboratory at the Institute of Industrial Science of The University of Tokyo, responsible for creating the work at the time. The program was displayed as a short version (5 minutes 30 seconds) of the original program (12 minutes 3 seconds) created in 1995.

Cooperation: Tsukihashi Osamu + Kobe University Tsukihashi Lab. /Okochi Manabu + Meiji University Okolab., Tabei Katsuhiko (MeAM studio), Namikawa Kosaku (tilde), Kobe Institute of Computing College of Computing, Hara Hiroshi+ATELIERΦ