Whole Earth Review

both mediums until the 1980s and 1990s, when he completed only one film but 32 videos. The ontological project he has consistently pursued was much admired by the British group of “structural/material” filmmakers in the 1970s and described by Malcolm Legrice in his 1977 book, Abstract Film and Beyond, as being a “detailed examination of our perceptual and conceptual mechanisms,” a tendency maintained with contemporary projects, particularly the Observer/Observed CD-ROM. What is it that makes a more recent medium useful to Iimura’s broader project? Clearly, analysis that sets out to define “seeing” in relation to sound, language and linguistics must provide the audience with the ability to participate in a process involving concentration and provide opportunity for reflection, meditation even. This piece of work allows users to pace themselves through part gallery, lecture room, catalogue and auto-analysis. Ingenious linking, judiciously designed, enables the user to move easily in a matrix of cross-referencing, between each state of comprehension. The three original video pieces (Camera, Monitor, Frame; Observer/Observed; Observer/Observed/Observer) are presented in digital format, providing a complete facsimile version of the original video (in itself a collector’s item). But in addition, this version goes further with the option to then enter the documentation of each piece and navigate between animated diagrams (Picture Plan) or a storyboard (Program) or a narrative description linked from one of the two essays written by Iimura: “The Visuality of the Structure of the Japanese Language” and “A Semiology of Video,” which can be read in extract form or complete as discrete pieces. Access to such varied but related knowledge makes apposite use of interactive multimedia. Considering the essential elements of cognition, when applied to the ubiquitous video/television image, the complex play, (“See”) between the subject, (“I”) and the Object (“You”) are interrogated such that each element (image/sound) is perceived (seen/heard) in relation to the video (closed) system by symbolically creating the diegesis of the moment(s) of recording. Spoken description (“I— See—You”) extends beyond these Vertovian principles, a la revenant, and introduces the semantic distinctions between English and Japanese and the separation created by the predicate verb placed in English between the subject and the object. The emphasis placed on the subject/ego in the technology of language is mirrored, but problematized, in the closed system of the video installation and that of the camera/operator. The Observer/Observed CD-ROM was made at the same time as another, Interactive: AIUEONN Six Features (also based on a video piece, from 1993), and provides the extension to the reflexive process that the time-based work proposes, enabling a practically active engagement with the work rather than an intellectual nonpassivity. The work of other senior artists (Valie Export, Simon Biggs, Nigel Helyer, etc.), has also made use of this technology, but essentially most of these have been archiving projects, pulling images and text into a conveniently searchable and viewable form. Iimura’s recent projects go far further in combining the rigor of earlier work with the accessibility and tractability of this interactive medium. The catalogue of the Jeu du Paume retrospective is a significant addition to the French/Japanese bibliography on the artist and a useful adjunct to the CD-ROM for English readers, providing hard copy of the diagrams and storyboards employed, and a highly detailed listing of biographical sources.