INDEX
Art as a Means to Revitalize the Unnecessary in Urban Environments
This SIDE CORE exhibition is built around the themes of “perspective,” “action,” and “storytelling.” I sense that these concepts align well with your creative work, TaiTan.
TaiTan: I collaborated with Ryohei Kamide, who previously worked on TV Tokyo’s Hyper Hard-Boiled Gourmet Report, to create a 10-minute television program called Gai (2021). We took over the early morning dead air when the broadcast stopped. The show featured surreal footage based on a premise where we hacked both TV Tokyo’s dead air slot and the surveillance cameras throughout Shibuya. During that month-long dead air period, we continuously streamed our new song. The program was focused on Tokyo’s underground, including a performance by Dos Monos filmed in the underground vaults of the Shibuya River.
That’s a novel idea.
TaiTan: Despite television being packed with regular programming from morning to night, there are inexplicable gaps of dead air. The culverts, too, are waterways that the city has forcibly buried underground by covering the rivers, rarely acknowledged yet undeniably present—almost like ghosts.
Someone once said, “In the basement of a building in the city, you can hear the murmur of the river that has become a culvert at midnight.” When you actually visit those places, you find that during the day, the noise of the city drowns it out, but at night, when the streets quiet down, you can indeed hear the faint sound of water flowing. In reality, it might just be the sound of drainage flowing through the sewer pipes. But standing still in the pitch-black underground, you experience a sensation as if your mind is trapped in your own head, or as if you are asleep but fully conscious. This draws you into someone’s narrative that “this is the sound of the river,” and the endless expanse of invisible underground waterways begins to float hazily in your mind.
Excerpt from a text for the SIDE CORE exhibition (Concrete Planet)
TaiTan: SIDE CORE also has works related to culverts, and the statement for this exhibition starts with a description of underground waterways. I’ve always been interested in things that are stagnant or deemed unnecessary in the city, like culverts or dead air, and I’ve wanted to intervene in those elements.
