Shin-ichi Takemura... Eco-Aesthetic Home... Doors2

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I have described some aspects of space in Japanese homes: as an information editing system where a multi-dimensional quotation and re-editing process promotes multi-sensory or cosmological symbolic and social mediation which amplifies our environmental and interpersonal experience in a very complex way. Space is full of invisable linkage of information even in the scenery in a miniature garden or a paper door picture. There are many potential click points through which you will be led to follow the linkage of an ecological or symbolic meeting and trigger off your imagination. So the first thing about the Japanese idea of space is an omnipresent kind of media space. And this informational system is basically interactive.

The whole system activates the subject to follow the hidden linkage to multiple relationships mediated by it. Any space in a Japanese context emerges according to the activity of the subject. Space has no identity or fixed function outside of the practice of the subject. For example, in the traditional context, if you put a dining table on a tatami floor, the room becomes a dining room. You get rid of this and put down a futon, a kind of portable bed, and it becomes a bedroom.

If you shut all of the sliding doors, every room will be independent. If you get rid of all of this, it will become the guest room. In a certain Japanese village, for example, an everyday home becomes a traditional theater if you get rid of all the sliding doors.

So no place has an identity, a priority. Every space is created situationally by practice of the person. It is basically very interactive and multi functional.

If you turn over a typical very small cushion, called zuafuton, it becomes the guest's places whereas before it was the hosts' chair. So everything is temporary and transient and emerges according to the activity.

 
 

This is a very attractive interactive art. Look at these awkward faces. You turn them upside down and they will become other faces. You find faces in the body of cats in those paintings and so forth. This one is also quite abstract. The image doesn't make sense until it is shown on a round surface.

 
 

So space itself is a potentially multimedia environment. How we can interact with it? Here is one very priviledged case. There is a popular custom of poetic games through which you interactively follow and find a link of images, symbols, time and space to amplify your experience of your environment. This poetic game is called haiku or, more precisely, lenka. A chain poem is created by networks of people.

Haiku, a seventeen-syllable poem, is a traditional mode of interactive game, in which one follows symbolic linkages and uses this associated knowledge to create. For example, if you find one bridge in the paper door picture or small home garden that represents the image of a famous legendary bridge, you can activate the linkage through quoting some poems illustrating that famous bridge and integrate them in your new poem. Here again, the multiple quotation and re-editing of knowledge links is essential. Secondly, the interaction with information space triggers symbolic links; activates interpersonal communication or collaboration. Interaction with the information space or environment activates interpersonal interaction. In the network groups, you may quote some context from the poem which was created a hundred years ago.

Through accumulation of such collaboration, linkage between some particular flower and bird; season or event; scenery or emotion becomes standardized. Some key word is used to trigger the image. So personal experience is networked and becomes a transpersonal reference. As a result of such accumulation and knowledge, a database of symbolic association--a symbolic ecology--has been compiled as a kind of encyclopedia of eco-aesthetic knowledge.

Here, we have the potential multimedia environment and the systematic interactivity and database to amplify our eco-aesthetic experience. But what is interesting is that this encyclopedia is not a mere collection of abstract knowledge, but is composed of a series of sample poems using passwords or seasonal key words. It is a kind of combination of interpersonal hypertext eco-aesthetic experiences. Actually, it has much in common with the home page.

L e a r n i n g   a n d   A l t e r i n g

You navigate through the database to follow or find a cultural link or image and activate your holistic experience in the eco-aesthetic sense. In such a system, the process of acquiring cultural knowledge of the eco-system is integrated in the process of using the data base to alter it. The process of learning and altering are combined or integrated. This altering process is also the process used to amplify the data base itself: to participate in the diachronic accumulation of interpersonal collaboration.

 
 

This is designed by my colleague and friend Mr. Matsuoka, director of an editorial engineering lab. It may be the first attempt to express the basic hyperconcept of Japanese symbolic linkage, the Japanese eco-aesthetic experience, in this kind of software. And this is a artistic tool and also a database. You can make haiku or E-mail, but in the text, you quote diverse contexts from the poems or database or diachronic home page and make up a text or a combination of graphics. Here, we chose the landscape interface. He chose the season of summer. In the graphics, a multi-contextual, re-editing of the context of an eco-aesthetic experience is accomplished. Here, a picture by Hokusai has been chosen: a view of mount Fuji. He also chose an object, in this case a Japanese nightingale, and tried to put it in the background. But there is no traditional linkage. What is a suitable background? What sort of background is linked to the nightingale? Here, it has become a tree. What is happening here is not mere acquisition of knowledge, but an example of knowledge as learning and altering in context.

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Last Updated: 23 feb 1995
© Copyright Shin-Ishi Takemura, 1994