Output details

OrNamenTTokYo

This portfolio output includes a collaborative project in Tokyo between myself and Rodrigo Garcia, Georg Tremmel (BCL) and Shiho Fukuhara who formed as ‘Mobile lab’. This aspect of the research is presented on the website ‘Ornamen Ttokyo’ (ornamenttokyo.tumblr.com). In OrNamenTTokYo my role was initiator and co-investigator with architect Rodrigo Garcia, also programmer and designer of the website (the project’s inventory). It was supported by the Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture (Austria). The research in Tokyo involved urban walks, workshops, seminars, online resources and publications. Working in between research, action, spatial organisation and artistic practice, the project constructed an alternative geography and architecture, built around the idea of extinguishing distances in the expanding urban and intellectual environment, and in networks that, instead of connecting, often de-socialise, mass-populate and enclose. The originality of OrNamenTTokYo can be recognised in how it formats and produces ‘common knowledge’: while there is extensive research on ‘the common(s)’ in the Western context (Toni Negri, James Boyle), in Japan the notion remains elusive and not yet fully explored. The research constructs the common as a conceptual unity, emphasising the singular processes constituting it. The research includes a paper entitled ‘tranquil hills fragile apparatus: Landscape film, migrational subjects, and diagrams of power’, delivered at Birkbeck College, London, for the symposium, ‘The Art Theatre Guild of Japan, Spaces for Intercultural and Intermedial Cinema’ (London, 2011).