TAISUKE KOYAMA

Art curator Duncan Wooldridge interviews the Japanese artist Taisuke Koyama. This conversation is published on the occasion of “Waves and Particles”, Taisuke Koyama solo show held in Metronom (31 May – 27 July 2019).

> Duncan Wooldridge: I think perhaps we could start with the visual experience that a viewer has when he or she sees your work for the first time. I notice the importance of colour, especially colour as a field, as plane and surface; and I notice that upon those fields, colour fluctuates. There’s an optical quality that I immediately notice: my eyes are sensitised. Could you say something about this, and the experience you think the viewer enters into?

> Taisuke Koyama: Photography can be quantified by its information or data, as an image visualized by pixels or particles. However, it also has another quality, always also present, of matter, that cannot be measured by its digitization. This twisted or double character of photography always leads me to an experimental approach.

I started focusing on colour with the Rainbow Variations (2009-), and most of my recent works deal with colours generated by arithmeticprocessing. In my work, colour itself is the trigger to enter a critical perspective towards the photographic image.

Regarding the experience of these images, I do not think the exhibition space to be such a stable place. We are not always experiencing or seeing the same thing. In the white cube, as we call it, the gallery aims for a pure space, but it is actually full of noise. Photography fixes information within its surface, but when photographs are placed into a space, they are still surrounded by noise. And those noises are the elements that make the work exist as an entity for me.

And so, the atoms of my photographic works are digital data. The photographs can be viewed as almost perfect objects in simulated digital space. However, paradoxically, I think that the work becomes the work only when the images is exposed to space, a space which will always be full of noise. (And so I mean that noise refers to any element that affects the experience of the work, inside and outside of the work.)

In recent years, a main theme for me has been how to create an environment in the exhibition space through my work. And, for now, I do not to develop those images in 3D simulated virtual space but in real space, for an experience of the image which is physical, material. In that space, through our bodies movements, we sense the light reflected on the surface of the photographic image and the experience of color changing.

> DW: It’s very interesting how you draw this physical connection out from the digital, especially by thinking about the pixel as an atomic or atom-like unit. And your interest to bring the work into that noisy, physical space seems like an extension of that thinking process, placing the image into the world. You seem to point to the fact that not only is the space continuously changing (as too is our experience of it), but so is the image, the photograph is changing…could you say more about this? 

> TK: I would like to write a little more about experiencing the works. The other day, I participated in a group show entitled “Illuminating Graphics 2” in Tokyo. The concept of the exhibition was to experience works in both real space and Augmented Reality. The work shown there varied, and included photographs, paintings, some sculptures and video works. In the last room of the venue, an augmented reality exhibition space was projected, allowing the viewers to walk around the exhibition room again using the game controller. My work is made with RGB data, and was here also placed in AR space as data (though the resolution, size, etc. differs in the AR space a little to how they exist as my digital files). My physical works are placed in real space, printed on glossy paper made by an inkjet printer and framed in an acrylic box.
What was thrown to us in this exhibition was the question of wherethe works are. This depends on our sense of reality and the accuracy of the AR space. Kevin Kelly has said that in the 5G era, AR space will become a ‘mirror world’ synchronized with reality. I felt that the work placed in real space seemed more like an artwork to me. I think the images that internalize change are the most important. For me, photography is the artistic media that records changes, variations, mutations, transitions and transformation. Everything is changing, on both the micro and macro scales. It is held within the image by image making. What is projected there is the process of change (even if the image appears static). It has a dynamic dimension, that is, it has movement.

I am also interested in producing images that are clearly moving, such as slide shows and video works. The first slide show I created was entitled High Speed Slide Show, which projected thousands of photos at a speed of 10 photos per second. In this work, the theme was the relationship between image and perception. PICO-INFINITY, made in 2016 is the most recent and immediate expression of my thoughts about the image and change. The algorithm does not repeat itself, but changes infinitely. The images are not changing, but it is the movement between them that continually shifts.

> DW: With the Pico works, you reach the monochrome, the most reduced and abstracted image, which also still has noise and variance. I’d like for a moment to focus upon photography and abstraction, because there has been a significant emergence of abstraction in photography in the past ten years, which your work participates in and takes into some very specific and new directions. Did you come to abstraction as a way of changing how you and your viewer might look at imagery?  What led you here?

> TK: Since childhood, my interest has been in the details. Perhaps it is also because I was learning about the natural environment (for example, focusing on a specific species in the forest). I was obsessed with the abstract image that formed by the stains and scratches on the wall.

There have been several stages of development, in terms of the depth of abstraction in my work. It was not premised upon expression, of setting a visual goal, but it stems from how I focused on a process of image making which uses the parameters of transformation that an image allows, and searching for the images contingency, programming and randomness. The notion of generating images by transforming elements of the image has been very important to me for the past decade. This importance is clearly linked to the situation where digital tools have evolved to facilitate the creation of “beautiful” photographic images. I wanted to discover the photographic images in alternative way by investigating the input device and software.

I started to deeply focus on generating images when I made the Melting Rainbows in 2010. But that was not just abstraction. I used various parameters such as natural phenomena, physical actions, errors in digital devices and applications, etc., in the conversion process to generate an image. There, abstraction and reification take place simultaneously. When the image becomes abstract, it brings a concreteness that can also be perceived at a microscopic level.

Recently, I have taken more concrete images in Tokyo, landscapes and cityscapes of construction sites. This act of shooting for me is like a field recording, and it is an act of collecting material for generating images later. I noticed a new approach when I stepped back. Currently in Tokyo a large-scale redevelopment is taking place in numerous wards which are triggered by the Olympics. Shibuya, Shinjuku, Tokyo Bay Area, everywhere is full of temporary enclosures and safety nets. And those materials are covering the city with a new surface. This situation enabled me to see the cityscape as a surface.

> DW: I’m glad that you have opened up this term ‘generation’, which is so integral to your working process, whether it is the cityscape, the visual motif of the rainbow, or in a photographic abstraction. You’ve used photography as a medium that moves far beyond representation, into something complex and rich: it is both ‘lossy’ – in the sense that qualities and details might be lost, flattened, blurred or reduced – but you have also, and this is rare in photography, it seems, understood the image as also generative and productive, continually making more new material. Rainbow Variations, including the work Melting Rainbows, began this process for you, and shows one way in which a motif can be retraced, transformed and revisited again. But I wondered if we could talk about your Light Fields and Nonagon Photon works, which bring your interest in phenomena back into relation with your interest in science. You have more explicitly tied your work to an interest in energy and light, phenomena and perception, haven’t you? How do you think of light and energy in relation to your work’s concern for ‘generation’?  
 
> TK: Well, for me, Rainbow Variations is a study on feedback loops and amplification of image. Nonagon Photon (and Tidal Lines) and Light Field were produced at different stages. In Nonagon Photon, which began production in 2010, I recorded out-of-focus reflections of the flickering sunlight, and in Tidal Lines, which was produced in 2013, I recorded the track of the full moon reflected on the high tide sea surface. Both focus on the fact that the natural light information input by the device is transformed through software and that the image is generated in a different way than our sight captures.

Light Field, starting from 2015 has a motif that is ‘light’: light is rarely the subject, it does not have the leading role; that is, the input light of a scanner allows for the reading of information. This was not only a scientific interest, but was originally aimed at creating an image with an “input light”, thereby updating the photogram in a contemporary way. As the work went on, Light Field became an extremely physical, action-based image creation.

The title of my exhibition at Metronom, “Waves and Particles”, of course, comes from the dual nature of light. Light as a wave and light as a particle are also ways of transmitting energy. In Nonagon Photon and Light Field, I visualized the light that is finally captured and imaged by the sensor by photographic action. This is the measurement of power (intensity, energy) and the visualization of rays. Neither the reflected light of the sun nor the input light of the scanner can be seen like that. It is a “transformed observation”. The “facts” do not make sense here. Facts change depending on the way we look, and photography is an activity that alters our observation. For me, it is important that the object is transformed by this generative process: it is important to because this creates a distinctive photographic reality.

> DW: A tension in your work is situated where the image responds to speed and transmission. I think we are at a junction in which there is a very wide gap between two poles, between the continuing, ever increasing rapid exchange of ‘representational’ or ‘pointing’ images (what I would call predominantly low friction imagery), which moves at speed, and an alternate, less familiar, pensive, complex, and often material photography (which I would think of as a high friction imagery) which moves slowly and forces us to slow down. Perhaps it is because I think of friction and I think of light – and photography’s relation to thermodynamics – that I can’t help speculating as to whether this relates to your interest in science and the qualities and experiences of light. Maybe I can put that more simply: it interests me that, whilst you work exclusively with digital technologies – a fast process, a rapid technology – your work does not speed up and become fast, quickly experienced and then left behind. That kind of experience in your installations and exhibitions just doesn’t seem to work. Instead, your work seems to call for the opposite, has a different effect, forcing us to decelerate a little, to create just enough friction. Your images, perhaps because they are abstract, and not quickly understood, resist just a bit. It takes some time to see and understand what you present to us. Does it matter to you to slow technology down? Or did you find that something within your images generated that tempo?

> TK: I have actively accepted the evolution of arithmetic processing. For the past 10 years, the cameras, computers, software, and printers which I use have continued to accelerate.

In some exhibitions of contemporary photography, with works that appear to be abstract and without use (where the image places an importance not on representing, but existing) there is a concern for difficulty to lead audiences to look deeply at what they see. Smartphones and SMS have definitely changed the way of seeing, and the manner of our image experience. Most people are now convinced that they can make visual decisions faster. However, we need to carefully think about whether the act of “seeing”, is seeing deeply, or just browsing.

As you say, the small resistance of my work is, certainly, to change the air convection and the angle of light reflection, by causing friction in the space where the image is installed. To “see” something is to focus on the trivial things and to find the triggers to rediscover the world. Therefore, I create an exhibition space to slow us down, with images generated by high-speed digital technology. But not all the technologies are fast. No, I should say that the amount of data that can be processed is increasing. Recently, I am using data recovery software to generate my works, but it takes about 10 hours for the ‘deep scan’ process. Due to time constraints, I can only check the results twice a day. This brings me a new experience too.

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Taisuke Koyama (1978, Tokyo) lives and works in Tokyo. Graduated in biology at the college school in Tokyo, he works with photography since 2003. He has exhibited in solo shows at Tokyo Polytechnic University (2019); Seen Fifteen, London (2018); Daiwa Foundation Japan House Gallery, London (2016); Sunday Gallery, Zurich (2015); METRONOM (2013). He has participated in numerous collective exhibitions such as Illumintaing Graphics, Creation Gallery G8, Tokyo (2019); # 005 PHOTO PLAYGROUND, Ginza Sony Park, Tokyo (2019); Seen Without a Seer | Radical Reversibility, Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam (2018); ANTOLOGIA, Metronom, Modena; The King and I, Palazzo Reale, Milan (2017). He obtained a residency at Setouchi Triennale in Shodoshima JP (2013) and won the prize of the 15th Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo (2012). In 2018 he took part in Paris Photo with a solo show and in Seoul Photo Festival.

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Duncan Wooldridge (1981, Hitchin, United Kingdom) lives and works in London, United Kingdom. he is an artist and writer. His writing explores experimental practices within photography and fine art. He writes for Artforum, Art Monthly, Elephant, and 1000 Words Magazine. In 2011 he curated the exhibition Anti-Photography for Focal Point Gallery, Southend, UK, and in 2015 curated an exhibition and edited a book on the work of British photo-conceptual artist John Hilliard, entitled Not Black and White. He is the Course Director for Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

Image: Waves and Particles, installation view at Metronom, 2019

28/06/2019