Soushi Tanaka (Japan)
Track
This work started on April 1, 2021, five years after we started “Post,” the first work we registered.
In the past five years, digitization has advanced, and the ways in which people acquire and publish social information, as well as the methods of image-making, including photography, have changed dramatically.
In addition to this, in recent years, works citing other people's work from the Internet and books have become recognized. With the passage of time, the work of creators has become simpler, and I imagine that the day will eventually come when we will let it go.
I began creating my work because I was interested in the relationship between conceptual art and photography, where images are systematically multiplied, and where I continue to create and publish my work every day.
The theme of my work is “to abstract social information through an optical mechanism, convert it into flat data, and make it public.”
This work is a reconstruction of the Post framework with today's parameters.
This work encodes the rules (algorithms) of Post and is automatically executed on a computer.
This work encodes the following production rules and automatically executes them on the computer at a fixed time every day.
- An optical system called “slit scan” is simulated (programmed) to convert the most viewed news program of the previous day into a single image.
Once the 2.1 image is generated, it will be posted on the website and Twitter.
Although it is not possible to read anything specific from the panoramic image, which is a series of colorful vertical lines with a news program frame, this image contains, for example, the presidential election of a major country, life in the Corona Disaster, the Olympics held in Japan, the war in Ukraine, etc. Every day from April 1, 2021, events are recorded.
I hope to use this obscure video as an opportunity for each viewer to pause in the information overload of modern life, to reflect on the challenges they face, and to regain a sense of autonomous thinking.
This work is also a clone of Post.
He was born and lived in Japan in 1978.
Around the year 2000, when he started working as a working adult, Japan's economic growth had ended, and with it, various social problems began to emerge, but people did not face these problems as serious ones.
More than 20 years have passed since then, and these problems that we turned a blind eye to have come to threaten our lives.
(These 20 years are called “the lost 20 (or 30) years” in Japan.)
He feels that it has become difficult to protect our lives by simply following the old ways taught to us by our parents' generation.
He has come to believe that the only way to protect themselves in today's society, where the right answer is unknown, is to continue to improve on what is optimal.
After finishing school, he got a job as a web engineer.
Through his work, he learned how to automatically process information and images with codes and applications, and how to use web services to spread information.
He also became interested in photography through the digital camera he used in his work and studied photography as an art form at a Japanese photographer's workshop for three years starting in 2012.
He was particularly interested in the conceptual art of postwar Japanese artists.
His work is based on these experiences and knowledge.
In this age of information overload, what kind of message can a photographer convey with his images and surrounding tools?
This is what he considers in his work.
