Attractors and the spirits of place: an experimental essay on Tetsuya Umeda's work (original) (raw)

If elasticity involves the ability to be shaped by an external force, Japanese choreographer Teshigawara Saburo uses his body as an acute sensory apparatus that is molded by the ever-changing landscape. Teshigawara creates his work from outside in. That is, by adopting music, lights, sets, and even the ‘air’ as affective technologies with which to contour the self, he develops his ‘ambient choreography’ to elastically reconfigure the border between humans and landscapes. By referring to the ideas of, Heidegger’s ontology of Ausser-sich-sein (being-outside-of-oneself), Watsuji Tetsurō’s concept of fūdo, and, the doctrine of Sōtō Zen monk Dōgen’s shūshō-ittō, this paper demonstrates how Teshigawara manifests his ‘ambient subjectivity’ (Paul Roquet) by ceaselessly communicating with the meticulously choreographed landscape and/or scenery.

Ueda writes in his 'Reading Nishida Kitarō' ('Nishida Kitarō o yomu') that to compare Heidegger’s entire thinking up to his last period with Nishida’s thought also up to his last period, including their multiple turns, would be “one of the most valuable paths to investigating the significance, potential, and problematics of Nishidian philosophy.” In this paper I examine the philosophy of Ueda Shizuteru through the juxtaposition of those two thinkers, of West and of East, who prove to be significant for the creative unfolding of his thought: Martin Heidegger who had inspired much of phenomenology and Continental philosophy, and Nishida Kitarō who had inspired the development of Kyoto School philosophy and much of contemporary Japanese philosophy. The Heideggerian and Nishidian streams of thought, in their “placial turns”—Nishida’s “logic of place” and Heidegger’s “topology of beyng”—meet in Ueda as he reads each in light of the other’s terminology and concepts. Through his readings and appropriations that underscore their commonalities and differences, Ueda thus develops a compelling philosophy of place, world, and horizon, a thinking of being-in-the-twofold-world. The chapter thus examines the meeting of Nishida and Heidegger in Ueda. This is a chapter in the forthcoming book, Tetsugaku Companion to Ueda Shizuteru--Thoughts About Experience, Language, and Zen, edited by Racquel Bouso, Ralf Müller, and Adam Loughnane; and published by Springer.

Drawing upon Vivian Sobchack’s notions of “ultra-hearing” and “ultra-seeing” (a re- interpretation of Bachelard’s sensory hierarchy), this paper explores the possibility and nature of moving from the ‘work’ (in electroacoustic musical and contemporary choreographical senses respectively) to an intermedial conception of a multisensory and ‘live-digital’ ‘event’ which moves from, through and beyond the ‘concrete’, towards a rhythmical space that is, in the words of Don Ihde ‘a deliberate decentering of (the) dominant tradition(s) in order to discover what may be missing’. The authors’ investigation into the taxonomies between sonic worlds, image generation and movement making, in a recent and on-going collaboration, therefore engages in the imaginative potential of an ‘event’ (in Massumi’s terms) where the modulation of acousmatic sound, image and movement becomes enlivened beyond the fixed dimensions of each respective discipline. Moreover, besides exploring the potential connections between sound, image and the body, the authors have been searching for a way to create environments that stimulate poetic relationships beyond the normal compositional opportunities afforded by each of their respective areas. This has encouraged a situation were technological and technical processes leads one to respond to the qualities of things, which in turn has encouraged an epistemology of materiality – not fixed in form – but open to the nuances that flow between them. Indeed, in terms of the integral nature of ‘fixing’ movement and image qualities in determining the nature of the ‘live’ or ‘performative’, there have emerged some interesting connections with post-Schaefferian musical practice. As Hansen describes, “At the heart of this endeavor is a conviction that today’s microtemporal digital technologies do not simply impact human sensory experience from the outside, but rather materialize a potentiality that characterizes sensory experience from its very origin...”. In consequence, a central concern has been how each of the constituent parts of the unfolding ‘event’ can then remain in flux, or better said remain un-fixed (the term ‘event’ and not ‘work’ is used purposefully here to avoid the idea that what is created is a fixed piece of work) in order to tap into sensory experience proper. Parallels relating to affect, interpretation and meaningfulness between electrocoustic and live-digital dance practices and audience experiences will be drawn. Notions of intimacy, central to this ongoing work, will be explored in relation to the conference theme; that is to say, between ‘live’ and digital, between eye and ear, between movement and digital image, and between performance and intermedia ‘environment’ and audience. Given the centrality of space as well as temporality in this endeavor, the authors continue to explore where such practice should happen; it seems already not in the concert hall or traditional dance venue...http://www.ems-network.org/spip.php?article36

This essay discusses Fujiko Nakaya, a Japanese artist who has been known since 1970 for the use of fog in her site-specific installations. Nakaya’s outdoor work is designed for and interacts with a particular site, facilitating spectators’ kinaesthetic awareness through a dynamic visibility and strategies of immersion. This essay discusses Nakaya’s fog work as reflecting her early contact with Western art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, filtered through a particularly Japanese aesthetic. I argue that the underlying principle informing Nakaya’s fog art is one of an imagined natural core that is accessible to the spectator paradoxically through the very artificiality of the environment Nakaya creates, and through the work’s facilitation of a reflexive receptiveness of one’s own transience. Nakaya’s work sustains an irresolvable relation between nature and culture that rejects the simple dichotomy of the human and the natural. Nakaya’s work accentuates the embodied experience of the spectator, giving rise to a new form of participation and ecological awareness.

In different ways, Watsuji, Nishida, and Merleau-Ponty describe a self that extends beyond the skin through a sort of dialectic of internal/external space of perception and action, which has implications for understanding the relationship between art and nature in artistic creation. Through an exposition of Watsuji’s conception of human being in relation to a climatic milieu, Nishida’s theory of the expressive body as the site of the world’s own self-transformations, and certain claims made by Merleau-Ponty in his essays on painting, this article provides a way of understanding how material media may become expressive when they are taken up by artists.

My paper will discuss the ontological implications of recent developments in Western philosophy of the notion of the imagination’s creativity in the collective sphere in terms of the social imaginary as noticeable in Paul Ricoeur, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Charles Taylor; the contributions two twentieth century Japanese philosophers, Miki Kiyoshi and Nakamura Yūjirō, can make in this regard; and a possible ontology of the imagination one might be able to draw from the above. Miki shows a connection between the imagination and a certain form-formlessness dynamic he inherits from Nishida Kitarō. Nakamura in turn points to a connection between imagination and place via his development of the Aristotelian notion of common sense (koinē aisthēsis, sensus communis). I then suggest that the linking of the imagination with the process of the forming of the formless as well as with place may allow us in turn to understand the imagination in the Greek ontological terms of the chōrismos of the chōra.