One day, a spectacular picture popped up in my brain. It was an image of abandoned electrical appliances being played as musical instruments on a street in a town. Using this image as a starting point, I set up the same number of tube televisions and PC-controlled video decks correspond to the number of notes in a musical scale to create a set of gamelan percussion instruments. Tapping TV tubes produces primitive and cosmic electrical music.

Amateurs and professionals compete in the same field in Japan Media Arts Festival, which is a very interesting aspect of this festival. In the exhibition, private productions and corporate productions are displayed in the same space at the same time. This is a kind of chaotic, but I feel it creates diversity that is never seen in other festivals. In that respect, the festival’s judgment criteria are not only concerned with the technology or the cost of a work but also with the themes that each work conveys. I think this is a very good point. However, I think there are still some difficulties in the way works are displayed in their category depending on the division. In my opinion, an exhibition should focus on appreciating original works, viewing live performances, and listening to what creators say. This is essential for exhibitions. Setting up presentation stages this year was a good point. I think the festival should increase its plans for live performances and exhibits of original works (especially installations and interactive works in the Art Division) as much as possible, depending on the trend of works. What is important is to create something that we can only experience by going there.

There are relatively few opportunities to specifically illustrate abstract ideas of media. In this work, the artist has brought an event into existence in a way that seems to embody Channon’s Theory of Communication, which makes us rethink about media. “One day, I accidentally plugged a sound cable into the composite video connector and the sound was rendered as an image. When I saw this, I thought that the same sound might be reproduced if I re-recorded it using a camera and output it as sound.” This work started from the artist’s encounter with this discovery. Similarly, a sound can be reproduced also as a sound even though it has once been transformed into an image. People use various media daily, but perhaps, people judge media from just the specific results. This work strengthens our awareness that we create expressions and live in a world where we utilize technologies that have plasticity and reconstructive properties, and we enhance these into other forms of expression.