Related works

Walking Cascade|KITADE Chieko



Our daily life is flooded with an enormous amount of information transmitted by media such as video. In Walking Cascade, OLTA likens such experience, driven by the digital media, to a waterfall. When you confront a waterfall, you receive the experience with all your senses; the journey to the site of the waterfall, the panorama in front of you, the sound and the splash of falling water, the temperature and humidity, and the surroundings. In this context, recorded video is seen as secondary. However, in contemporary information-driven society, the relationship between the physical experience and the document is reversed, and the visual experience conveyed by the video document often becomes primary. The question then arises as to whether the structure of the perception is still universal, or whether it is changing? With this new work OLTA tries to visualize the accumulation and transformation of information in three ways. Firstly, through the artists’ bodies as the creators of video. Secondly, through bodies as its receivers. Finally, through media which document and record.
At the opening of the exhibition, OLTA gives a performance inspired by Rokusai Nenbutsu Odori, a traditional Japanese Buddhist folk dance that is performed mainly by farmers in Western Japan in honor of spirits. In spite of its variety of forms and traditions, it is often the case that a group of a few people visit each house in a village and dance all night accompanied by drums, bells, and flutes. In OLTA’s performance, the members dance to the sound of their own voices and original instruments improvised from household objects. This performance is recorded and then replayed repeatedly throughout the exhibition period. The continual transformation and updating of the meaning are actualized on site through the performance and its subsequent replay; through the video on which the performance is recorded and its replay; and through the bodies of the viewers encountering the installation.
OLTA is an artist collective formed in 2009 by six graduates of the Oil Painting Course at the Tama Art University Department of Painting. The members are HASEGAWA Yoshiro, INOUE Toru, Jang-Chi, KAWAMURA Kazuhide, MEGUNINJA, and SAITO Takafumi.