#KazuhiroGoshima
Kazuhiro Goshima: After the metabolic cities
“Our world – a faint mountain echo empty and unreal”Ryokan, poet and calligrapher ( 1758-1831 )
In the early 1960s, Japanese architects and city planners viewed the urban environment through its flexible, interchangeable dimensions. They hoped in this way to respond to problems of overpopulation and congestion inevitably awaiting their megalopolises during this period of exceptionally high economic growth. Taking inspiration from paradigms drawn from natural science, the Metabolists were planning the city of the future as an organic entity, constantly transformed by what almost amount to biological processes. Integrating the various flows and other velocities, their buildings were designed as megastructures, through which all a city’s functions could potentially flow together. Although Kazuhiro Goshima does not openly position himself in terms of metabolism, his output does not fail to revive certain issues that relate to it. In the first place, his entire work can be seen as a meticulous aesthetic investigation aimed at identifying the ontological bases of urban reality.
Whether through video or animation, Goshima always contrives to get his message across with the same precision. Like a conscientious biologist, he dissects our fleeting perceptions in order to materialize virtualities and distinguish permanences. However, unlike the Metabolists, Goshima acknowledges our fundamental inability to grasp the complexity of urban reality. Whether technical drawing, photography, maps and road signs, or 3D models, technologies and representational devices are constantly being perfected and renewed. However, in the final analysis, the city always ends up moving away from all procedures of objectification. On the basis of these few preliminary remarks, we can isolate three subjects that emerge more or less explicitly in each of Goshima’s productions. Namely a desire to reduce the quantity of information conveyed, a questioning of the different processes of virtualization of urban phenomena, and a methodical observation of architectonic drift.
Fade into White: The Chromatic Haikus
Throughout the 1990s, Goshima was involved in numerous commercial productions as a freelance 3D computer-graphic artist. In this capacity, he was often forced to overbid when faced with the craving for special effects expressed by his clients. This is why, from his earliest artistic productions, he sought to make a radical break with the mannered ultra-realism that was commonplace in his profession. In this connection, the series Fade into White ( 1996–2003 ) was for him a soothing reaction against the overloaded representational codes that dominated synthetic imagery during this period. These four black and white animations present successions of sequences in which objects and environments are differentiated through sharp contrasts. A ping-pong ball, a train, or clocks come back like dreamy ritornellos in these atonal spaces. However, even the most everyday objects always end up being transfigured, and our confident perception of things is unfailingly dismantled. The most familiar situations are turned into bipolar abstractions, which sometimes end up fading into dazzling limbo or areas of shade. By tying together the cognitive permutations, each sequence of Fade into White takes the form of a little haiku with its implacable poetical charge.
Z Reactor: The Drift of Buildings
The Drift of Buildings: Even if it is expressed in a totally different way, we also find this quest for stylistic refinement in the video Z Reactor ( 2004 ). Through this fluid photogram, with its stereoscopic depth, Goshima invites us to plunge our gaze into the variable flows that are city features. As we know, certain processes, such as modes of transport or telecommunications, are endowed with unusual speed, or even furtiveness, while others, conversely, take place over longer periods of time. These are the ones that Z Reactor highlights. At first glance, we think back to the hordes of city folk, the fleeting shadows and the highways hatched with red and white, giving rhythm to the classic Koyaanisqatsi ( 1983 ) by Godfrey Reggio. But this is a deceptive comparison, for Z reactor is not a spectacular allegory of time accelerating through mobile elements passing at breakneck speed. These are far too fleeting and end up becoming lost in jerky fades. Z Reactor rather draws our attention to much more elusive velocities. Indeed, this succession of still pictures, seemingly remotely controlled with a clickable wheel, makes manifest the fluid and almost plant-like movement of the physical environment. Like elements that are on the face of it immutable, the architectonic environment reveals its slow but sure drift.
Different Cities: A Consensusual Virtualization
This exploration of the city’s more or less tangible mutations is taken a stage further in Goshima’s latest production. The cinematographic reality, subtly stepped up in Different Cities ( 2006 ), depicts a megalopolis caught at the precise moment of an unprecedented watershed, namely, that pause when individual people seem to be totally overwhelmed by the unsettling consequences of urban architectural sprawl. Time is now suspended and all historical, relational, and geographical criteria capable of anchoring the city have evaporated. The maps and road signs are blurred into strange figurations. Lines and stations get mixed up on the subway maps, forming undifferentiated gaseous biotopes. Lost in portions of space, the characters in Different Cities react calmly to this sudden spatial expansion. A couple of motorists pass through an incommensurable algorithmic scene, a young woman traces cats’ paw-prints, graphics artists lose patience in endless staircases, a geometer comes out with a few philosophical hypotheses, all these people seem to be looking for physical and conceptual beacons capable of holding back this consensus virtualization. Through his different productions, Goshima is constantly questioning the various procedures capable of stabilizing our fluctuating perceptions of urban reality. Reproduction systems and devices become so many alibis for flipping over into abstraction, the poetic, or the irrational.
In this sense, his aesthetic reactions to information overload, to the frenetic rhythms and architectural saturation, operate only as a pretext. Rather than propose grids of interpretation of the city copied from the models of scientism, Goshima questions the shortcomings of the obvious by driving us ever closer to the edge of the visible. By the same token, his scrupulous ontological investigations into reality are invitations to look for the immanent, sometimes demiurgic, forms that govern our daily lives. Kashuiro Goshima’s entire work promotes a quietism that exudes unquestionable fragrances of Zen philosophy.
Joël Vacheron
