In the course of working out what the concepts behind the exhibition should be, when Kensuke Sembo told me what his idea was, I thought “who on earth would want to participate in a show like this?” His proposal was “make an exhibition space that looks like an ancient burial mound, and entomb within it some works that can no longer function,” and my reaction was very direct and visceral: “I don’t want to see my works in a tomb.” The reason was probably because of the feeling “I don’t want myself or my work to be killed, I want them to live forever” is within me. However, I came to think the indistinct subjects of “tomb” and “work” had become entangled with one another, so I responded to Sembo’s first email as follows:

Metaphorically, the tomb aims to give eternal life to the dead; to put it differently, it is built so that the people left behind can remember those who have passed. The significance of functionalizing the recollection of those memories may be a poetic device, or it may be an artwork. When the burial mound takes shape as a great, huge thing, it is a symbol of the power of the dead, such that they take the guise of various unseen gods. The burial mound or tomb is a device for showing that which, in some sense, has not died. Moreover, in the same way, the “work” for the author may itself be a “tomb,” because although there is a limit on the lifespan of the physical body of the human being, we could also say that “works of art live forever,” so it is possible to survive forever as a general idea, though the object will not last forever. Well, the philosophies of Aristotle or Descartes were subject to debate, because their words “live forever.” In other words, you could say that a work of art raises the dead.

Why do humans bury their ancestors in tombs? Should we also entomb our works? It is natural to recycle all of the original materials, even with paintings, so that a new image is painted on top of the previous image. In our case, it is common for one computer to hold many different works. The term “entomb” might only apply in extreme cases. That then led me to focus the phrase “broken works” as problematic.

In fact, calling them “broken works” is also tricky. Physical aspects – the visible parts that have been lost or transformed – should be restored, so that some sort of resemblance can be attached again. The problem is in those situations where no　designs are left. In many cases, the original designs will have to be guessed. This is the kind of thing that archaeologists do, right? By guessing the reasons things were made and the technologies of the time, they create designs. If we can gather designs and the materials to make them, we might be able to restore any broken works. Though even if the designs for Nam June Paik’s works are not gone, and if the specification does not require that they be shown with CRT screens, it might still not be a problem to reproduce them on a contemporary LCD screen. If the CRT screen specifications exist, we can simply build a factory for reproducing CRT screen. We are able to enjoy the music of Bach’s era because the sheet music remains, and performers enjoy interpreting that sheet music while the audience analyses their interpretations. So this is like using a saxophone to play a piece that was intended for the harpsichord. In short, if the sheet music is the program, then the appearance of the algorithms is the musical performance. Paik’s works are also algorithms, and if something was made as just one example or as a prototype, it might be fine to make different versions of it. In practice, it is the algorithms making them that produce such variation in these works. Although the 1965 Magnet TV was a work that is absolutely impossible to implement without a CRT screen, and therefore must be displayed on a CRT, there are also works that could be displayed just as well on an LCD as on a CRT.

Media art works assume the use of electricity, so they have the fundamental problem of not working without power. On the day the ZKM closed, the projectors were switched off, but the work did not stop running, so the sound could still be heard. Although the machine itself was not broken, the work did not function. The visible aspect of the object completed it. Although it was not broken, it had partly lost its energy.

There may also be literacies that have been lost. Until about 20 years ago, I liked dial telephones (black telephones), so I always used them, but if my children’s friends stayed over late and I asked them “please call your mother,” when I showed them the phone they didn’t know how to turn the dial, and they pushed their fingers in the holes. This is an example of how things can fail to function if people don’t know how to use them.

In the category of works that use computers, I think the relationship between data and algorithm can become an issue, but since the programming language may act as media describing the algorithm, I wouldn’t have thought that there would be any algorithms that can only be described in a specific programming language, so none of them should really break. However, the necessary data may be broken, and this could make restoration impossible, right? However, that would be because the data management was poor.

When you think about it this way, it is somewhat difficult to define “broken works” that Sembo refers to. The remaining possibility is that for some reason a work was miraculously created through some means that the author has forgotten, and for all that, cannot now be seen or cannot function. Or, works that from the beginning functioned through a force of will. Or, works that never functioned to begin with. Works that have been unbroken from the start. Perhaps that’s what it comes down to. Come to think of it, several of exonemo’s works are breaking down or have broken, and this itself is the theme of the work. So, maybe all of the works should be made on the theme of being broken? Perhaps that’s the conclusion of this.

Sembo’s response starts:

It’s possible that the works could be repaired as you say, but I am not very optimistic about it (maybe it would be better to say I haven’t been very optimistic so far. I’ve been warming up to the idea more recently.) For example, one of my own works is a program that runs on a specific browser on a 1990s desktop computer, but even if you were to emulate it on a present-day operating system, it could still somehow feel different. This could just be me as an artist talking about the little details, and perhaps nobody else would mind, but still, because I’m always worrying about extremely fine details (even though at first glance my works seem kind of sloppy, lol), and within the code, I attach importance to the reaction speed in the machine environment down to the split second, so that things happen at a speed that is understandable, and set the strength of the display lighting to give a feeling of “here it is.” This is interconnected with the machine at the time and the machine equipment environment, so it would not be possible to simply convert the code, making things difficult. When it comes to visuals, then although there are general standards such as frame rate and angle of view, media arts with a high level of fluidity in technology might not follow these standards, and in this kind of sense it would be difficult to preserve them.

The work mentioned above is to a large extent “miraculously created through some means that the author has forgotten.” It seems to be made up of the computers used at that time, the internet speed, and the primitive nature of the programming. Rather than “broken,” it might be better to say there is variation, and with my other work, in that this involves driving around with the mouse connected to the gun batter of a toy tank, almost all of the motors have broken (that is, they are simply destroyed mechanically). Perhaps anything can be resolved if enough human intelligence is sunk into it, but there are works that don’t need to be restored in the first place (perhaps almost all works are like this?). For example, the works that did little more than demonstrate the leading-edge technology of the time have no reason to exist anymore, now that the technology has been surpassed. Rather than being broken, they seem to have simply died naturally. I think this is the risk involved in media art.

Then Fujihata replied:

But this is arguably trash. There are piles and piles of this stuff about. You can’t make exhibits out of works that are not interesting, or that no longer functioned as they once did. You have to take a different route to create an exhibition that makes people think positively about the meaning of the word “broken.” Perhaps war museums would make a good point of reference here? War and technology are closely related, weapons are used for destruction, and war is the result of that. The ostentatious television broadcasts of the military in North Korea seem so over the top that it makes you want to laugh. I heard that it is dangerous to preserve a nuclear warhead that has never been used.

Sembo:

“Nuclear warhead, preserved without being used = symbol of peace” is an incredible idea. It reminds me of Tamori (Japanese comedian) saying “paradoxically, love is the cause of all wars.”

Fujihata:

I think there are a few main points. Seen from within the flow of history, I think this kind of problem can be treated simply as “the critical spirit of the era.” The works generally consist of criticisms of something about that time. Media art is fundamentally media criticism, right? The problem is those cases in which the object of that criticism has disappeared with the times. Despite that, if there are some people who have a sense of the purpose of the works, then discourse is created, and the works are a historical development on what remains in that discourse.

Sembo responded again:

When I went to New York, I felt keenly aware of this (art being treated as “the critical spirit of the time”) at the Whitney Museum, when I saw how closely American art follows history. Within these works, there remains a vivid trace of the artists’ responses to their time. I became aware that this was something subconscious that could not be saved with writing or other methods, and I recognized something of the role of art. After that, for a while, there were also times that I asked myself whether there was any point in creating works in media that will not be preserved for posterity. Now I believe that creating works thinking about “preservation” is putting the cart before the horse, but if I were to thoroughly explain the works and their background, even if they had no impact at the time, it might still be possible to get a sense of their significance. That’s also a totally good thing.

Sembo continued:

More transient media art might in that sense be unique. Kinetic art also will not work if it is broken, but something sculptural remains (a corpse?).

Fujihata responded:

Ah, now I think I finally understand what you’ve been getting at. Media art is a product of its time. Works should be thought of on the premise that their meaning has been lost with time. As the machines change, so too do the media objects change. It’s not a tomb, but a morgue. Although it would be great to be able to look at the remains and also see what they were like at the time, but maybe this isn’t possible with media art. Perhaps there are solutions, and the next generation might be able to imagine it without a problem just by looking at them. For example, could synthesizers be called the corpses of modern music? There was this notion that the modern 12-note scale would be killed by synthesizers. In fact, we were so thrilled when we were told that it would enable the synthesis of any sound of music instrument, and would play just as written on the score, but it turned out it didn’t work that way at all; obviously, one cannot play keyboard like a violin.

Sembo:

“Synthesizers are the corpses of modern music” is an awesome punch line! I don’t quite get it yet, but…well, in other words, “Synthesizers came about with the label ‘this can make any kind of music,’ and though they had the power to kill the 12-note scale, that doesn’t mean that they actually achieved it,” I guess?

Our conversation kept going like this. Going back to the original subject, our correspondence concluded as follows.

I just came to understand that this chain of emails sprang from the question of how we interpret “broken works.” Our initial, shared understanding was that broken works are the ones in which it is no longer possible to exchange critical elements with the audience. Its cause could be anything from physical damage, to a broken switch, to the loss of certain software or external libraries, etc. Conversely, we artists sometimes say that a work is still “alive” as a metaphor used to describe a work that is still in a condition of flux between the artist and the work itself; in other words, a work that is incomplete, or that has not established an appropriate place in society. So if we integrate these two types of works, media art, which functions by turning on the power, may be considered “immortal,” because it requires dynamic relationships between the work and the viewer to exist as an artwork, making it harder to fix its place in society. It would be extremely difficult to define an artwork that is ever-changing while it becomes part of the era, the society, or humanity. What makes media art difficult to understand may not be not merely problems with hardware and operating systems, but also the relationship between the work and its viewers (=media).

Simply using media as the subject matter makes it “immortal,” but it has an ambivalence to it, because if the power drops, it becomes nothing more than a machine with no relevance to the media that is supposed to be the subject matter. Media art, rather than being simply immortal, becomes dysfunctional quite easily. In contrast, the artworks that rely on conventional materials can easily die, because it is difficult for them to become dysfunctional. So, it’s obvious: it is difficult for them to fall into disrepair, because as works of art they are already dead.

And now about the tomb. I believe tombs are the place where our ancestors are given immortal life. Salvador Dalí said that he devoted himself to painting because he knew that part of himself would remain in his paintings, so he was determined to discover techniques that would survive forever, which he referred to as “recipes of immortality.”  However, Dalí’s ambitions were relevant only because there were museums, or tombs for artworks, in the time he lived, and would not be applicable in times when all artworks were destroyed, such as the time of the Cultural Revolution in China. Some might even argue that during Chinese Cultural Revolution, all of the best works were taken out of the country, and have been preserved in foreign countries. So the bottom line is, if the work is worthy, it will be preserved. But then a new question arises: how does one decide the worthiness of an artwork? Dalí’s immortal painting techniques may have been praised only because he successfully made the case for the value of his art. By the way, I had an opportunity to visit the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and see small-sized pieces by Dalí. Some of them used very tiny text, while others sort of looked like hand-written text but were actually pieces that had been cut out from printed materials. I even needed to enlarge them with my iPhone as my eyes were not good enough to read them. His works are really mesmerizing. There is still a lot to discover in his paintings.

To conclude this diversion that may seem like mental gymnastics, what you envisage for this exhibition is really an attempt to create “immortal media art,” isn’t it? As one of the artists being invited to participate, I would be much more intrigued if you could put it that way than being asked to “bury my work in the tomb.”

Our emails went on like this for a month, and I deeply enjoyed the whole discussion. Later when it got close to the opening date of the exhibition, I visited the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, and met Sembo and the other artists, some of whom were familiar faces. Taking a close look at so-called “dead” works by each artist brought up various thoughts. Now I would like to talk about them.

What lies behind media artworks?

First of all, we refer to media art as a general form of artwork that utilizes new technologies. However, meaningful media art, the kind that offers real value, is work that experiments with how these media technologies transform our perception and understanding, by exploring new forms of representation. However, this concept itself, I realized, is not only attached to media art. In any era, it is the artist’s attitude of radically challenging the norms that fuels innovative form of arts. The norms being challenged could relate to anything, be it social, political, scientific. In light of this, one can define media art as an experiment that radically questions the rapid progress of media technologies.

In fact, when video technology was invented, various artists started to create pieces that explore what the video camera captures through the lens. The phenomenon was followed by photocopiers and computers. And then there came the internet. As technologies transform, so do works by artists, accompanied by various experiments and new discoveries. However, due to the extremely fast pace of technological advancement, conventional art theories which have been fostered for more than 2000 years, as well as media categories used in art history (i.e. materials, paintings, or techniques), do not apply to most media art. Curators must be able to differentiate an oil painting from a watercolor painting when the piece is presented in front of them, but when it comes to media art, they must follow the traces of technological transformation in order to appreciate and criticize the artist’s work. And when this requirement is met, the curator will come to understand what the artist has accomplished through the work of art, or his/her creative input that distinguishes his/her work from a job whose goal is to meet certain specifications and demands from clients.

Media artists are curious about new technologies because of their desire to use and understand it. Or it could be that behind this lies the desire to possess it. This desire, however, is not new to the field of art. For example, Leonardo da Vinci is known for testing an oil painting technique, which by then was considered the state of the art, only to fail; and similarly, Anish Kapoor bought all the patents for the unimaginably dark, “blackest” black pigment as soon as it was invented. Kapoor must feel that he has a monopoly over it. In this respect, one could say that he has a strong sensitivity to new media. (However, it is also true that his behavior was criticized in the press as selfish.)

New technologies are alluring objects. They are symbols of a power that we don’t possess, and the key that unlocks the door to a world that we have yet to see. Because of this, media art can be hard to create. Since media artists use technologies as their tools, very often the technology overtakes the artist’s creativity, making the work a mere demonstration of how to use the tool. This is where those works fall down. In order for an art piece to be art, media artists must, rather than demonstrating the technology, depict the true nature of the technology through their works. Only by doing so can artists position their works on the same ground as technology, giving them the right to criticize the technology. Yet, it takes time to tell if a work of media art has taken this position, long enough for the technology to be outdated.

This is what makes media art a form of art. Just like it took a long time for photography to achieve recognition as an art, we need to see the end of an era and fading of a technology in order for us to see the true value of an artwork. From this standpoint, the attempt to collect such past works through this exhibition, even though many of them may not function as they once did due to technology breaking down, is still very meaningful. It gives us opportunities to discover new findings after decades have passed since their invention.

Now, about death

At the symposium on the opening of the exhibition, I proposed that “artworks die three deaths.” First, when they are born: the work leaves the hands of the artist as it is created. That is my opinion based on my own experience, and that is the criteria for a good artwork. Artwork is born to an artist and meets its beholders (although the very first beholder is the artist themself), and as soon as it is seen by the beholders it leaves the hands of the artist and becomes something that can no longer be altered by the artist. So that is the first death it encounters.

The work will continue to live among others after that. The work is observed and experienced by new beholders one after another, who will discover in it meanings that even its artist did not know. You may say that the depth of this uncharted territory represents the lifespan of the work. That is how, for instance, a cave mural, which is still incomprehensible and waiting to be solved after thousands of years, mystifies us and at the same time urges us to reveal it. Hence, an artwork wanders among different beholders, until it becomes someone’s possession, then it meets the second death. (When Otomo Yoshihide’s work, without record, was requested to be borrowed from the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo for his own exhibition, it was so overly packed and the delivery cost so inflated that he had to give up displaying it. This anecdote demonstrates this precisely. When it gained eternal life, it became locked up in an excessive life-support system.)

On the other hand, even when an artwork has been lucky enough to end up in a museum, wouldn’t that mean that it would cease to be seen by anyone, for people lose a particular kind of interest in things once they know where to find them? So there is the death of being forgotten. The field of art history and research in such places is the dissection of cadavers, and it is curation that shines a light on art. Those are the works that bring out the value in the artwork that even the artist was not aware of. In that sense, the museum is a place that keeps the dead so they can come back to life any time.

Yet museums, too, are not eternal. They don’t protect artwork from destruction by war and corrosion. Bodily death will fall upon all material beings. This is the third death, “material death,” the clearest death of all. Hence, the three deaths of artworks I proposed in the beginning are creation and then leaving the artists’ hands, opening by beholders and being forgotten, and becoming irreparable.

Let’s step back and think about this. The view of life and death centered around material was mainly created by the modern system that also created museums. On the other hand, one can view art in a more performative sense, as an experience of the beholder. It is more obvious in artworks such as music, which dissolves into space. (In response to a questionnaire Christophe Charles stated the following; “Concerts and performances are transient. They disappear as soon as they are over. The Mona Lisa also is constantly changing with time. We can never twice see the same Mona Lisa.”) Music only exists as an experience, and it is impossible to fix it as a material. Even when it is stored in materials such as records and CDs, one has to think in terms that require time to be spent with devices that recreate it. Music scores also cannot be experienced without the act of performing them. Even for great performers who hear the music as they read the score, the music only exists in time. From such experience, we can say that media arts are more music-like than visual arts. In fact, for the most part they cannot be explained through printed catalogs, because experiencing them in time is important to understanding them.

If you can call such experiences and the memory of them artworks, they will continue to reincarnate through their beholders. I read somewhere in the past that, “Hymns are the medium for conveying the teachings of Christ.” This interesting perception of the media was eye-opening to me. The paradigm is clearly there in Christ resurrecting through the body as a medium that regenerates music. Although they don’t operate by electricity and buttons, hymns and human bodies are in a way fundamental media. In that sense, even after a body that conveys the artwork dies, the artwork lives as long as the coming generations continue to convey it.

Hence, media artworks go back and forth forever between “immortal” and “mortal,” in the sense that they are made of material, and they also focus on human experiences.