Moving with the Rhythms of the City

Alongside establishing an absolute background, the attunement patterns of ambient media also serve as an interface between the rhythms of the body and the pulse of the surrounding city. This chapter moves into a closer analysis of the rhythmic aspects of ambient entrainment. Before examining how ambient media filter the rhythms of the everyday, I first consider how complex the patterning of urban life has become by tracking the rhythms accompanying a trip to Nakano, a neighborhood in western Tokyo a few stops outside Shinjuku. I then turn to the work of Henri Lefebvre for a model of different ways rhythms can align and what these ways imply for social relationships. The remainder of the chapter looks at how ambient video artists have negotiated the relationship between video and the existing rhythms of the city. Although the turn to personal mediation has long been read as a retreat from social engagement and the outside world, I suggest the ambient use of media can also be understood as an adaptive way to align the somatic self with the fluctuating rhythms of the city.

Nakano, like most urban Japanese neighborhoods, is arranged around a central train station. Nakano Station services around 125,000 passengers a day via the Chūō, Chūō-Sōbu, and Tōzai lines. Nakano’s rhythms are oriented, first, around the Japan Railways and Tokyo Metro trains stopping briefly at the Nakano Station platforms on their journey between central Tokyo and the western suburbs. From the first train in the morning (around five a.m.) to the last train deep into the evening, regular and express trains arrive at frequent intervals to more than a half-dozen platforms. Prerecorded voices announce upcoming trains every minute or two.

After a train arrives with a blast of air and the doors automatically open, a spontaneous choreography emerges: those in line to board take their places perpendicular to the boarding zones, timing their entry to the moment the train car has finally disgorged all its disembarking passengers. A melody plays on the loudspeakers, warning the doors are about to close. This melody is enough to trigger an immediate bodily response—for example, an increased heart rate while watching someone rush to cross the train car’s threshold before the doors slide shut.1 By the time the latecomer catches his or her breath, the train is already moving out of the platform and picking up speed. The standing and sitting passengers onboard adjust their bodies to the rocking of the carriage as it speeds away along the tracks.

The same scene repeats every two to seven minutes. Above, overhead speakers play looped recordings of the soft sound of chirping birds. Set against the urgency of the other platform noise, the bird recordings introduce a slower, more relaxed temporality amid the trains’ swift arrival and departure. Whatever daily and yearly rhythms these birds may have originally had—dawn choruses and rainy-day retreats—are eliminated in favor of ensuring the calming affordances of their perpetual chirping presence.

Paired with these auditory cues, visual and tactile rhythms help orchestrate the flow of people. Rapidly updated train arrival information appears on overhead displays in the station and over the doors inside the trains themselves, sharing space with the advertising and advisory posters placed at regular intervals inside the trains and around the station. Ubiquitous bumpy yellow lines mark the edge of each platform and form a walking path for the visually impaired, while color-coded horizontal bars on platform edges serve as guides on where to cue for each arriving train.

The trains are divided into numbered cars, each with a set of numbered doors. As the train slides into the platform, these doors lock into alignment with the horizontal bars marked on the platform and the parallel lines of waiting passengers assembled behind them. Posted on a nearby pillar is a vertical chart of stations the train will subsequently stop at and the exact number of minutes needed to reach each. This diagram maps out the choreography awaiting passengers as they line up in spaced intervals synchronized to their chosen length of train. Recently, graphic scores have appeared on JR train platforms marking the location of exits and elevators at each subsequent station, allowing passengers to choose which train car to board with a thought to their trajectory at the other end of the line.

Nakano station disgorges its users through two sets of gates, again setting up a transient rhythmic ritual as people cue, swipe, tap, or insert proof of payment and slide through the now opened gates (another set of doors about to close). Outside the exits a circle of taxis and several lines of busses edge forward length by length, their automatic doors opening and closing to allow passengers to board. To the north, past the daily lottery stand and the seasonal vendors, an island of smokers gathers around the designated area, their time there measured by the length of the burning sticks between their fingers. Off to the side, there is likely some busking—perhaps the tap dancer, the jazz band, or the teenage girl playing a Casio keyboard and serenading her older male audience with the theme song from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Past this group near the entrance to the main covered shopping arcade, Nakano Sun Road, two or three people hand out advertisements and tissues and repeat their marketing entreaties to passersby, only to be mostly ignored. Once into Sun Road, the pedestrians usually maintain a brisk tempo while walking up through the rows of brightly lit shops. Pacing this procession is music played on overhead speakers throughout the shopping arcade, an unpredictable (though usually weather-appropriate) mix of dramatic motion picture soundtracks, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, steel drums, and the occasional selection of easy-listening hits for sitar. On both left and right, the automated doors of each storefront slide open and closed at irregular intervals, triggered by the passing movement of bodies up and through the arcade and in and out of the stores.

The intensity, density, and tempo of this procession shifts across the course of the day, peaking during the morning and evening rush. It also shifts across the week, with the weekend leisure crowd bringing an entirely different energy than the weekday commuters. Holidays pull even more people to Nakano, while rainy weather diverts those who prefer the quieter side streets in toward the covered shopping arcade. Immediately to the east, narrow alleys crowded with bars and small restaurants follow a slower rhythm—more attuned to lingering over small plates and the evening ritual of alcohol consumption—while on the larger streets to the west and north traffic lights punctuate a much faster flow of automobile traffic.

These midlevel rhythms of transportation, work, consumption, and leisure have the most immediately visible impact on the space in and around the station, but they are in constant interaction with patterns of larger and smaller scale. On the scale of the person, individual rhythms abound, beginning from the diverse range of walking styles in evidence (more quick and determined among the suited businesspeople, more relaxed along the fringes where the children and the elderly trod along). Within the body even more localized biorhythms help shape the action: digestion, heartbeat, energy levels, speech, and the habits of thought.

At longer wavelengths are fluctuations of the weather, the seasons, and the local economy. Then there are the vicissitudes of local history: the consolidation of the area’s twelve villages into two in the late nineteenth century, the transformation of the region from farmland to residential suburb in the wake of migrations following the 1923 Kanto earthquake, the destruction of nearly half the neighborhood after the American bombing raids of 1944, and the more recent influx of people from other parts of Asia—not to mention the disappearance of the forests that covered the area when humans first arrived around 23,000 years earlier.

This brief tour of Nakano’s rhythms barely begins to describe the interwoven patterns of people and objects as they move through and around the station. But it gives a sense of how much movement through the city depends on navigating a multitude of temporal and spatial meters. Navigating these complex urban spaces demands continual negotiation with the rhythms traversing them.

The challenge here is to find a way to align all these rhythms and move between them in a way that allows them to work together rather than cancel each other out. Crucially, this does not demand a person’s complete submission to the already established rhythms of the city. As a passenger the coming and going of trains may be largely out of my control, but inside and around them, I am constantly enacting my own small compositional choices with and through the rhythms I encounter. Do I swerve or stop, take the escalator or take the stairs, stand or sit, keep near the doors or move further into the train, look around or pretend to sleep? Once settled in my spot within the train car, do I watch the short, silent advertisements looping endlessly from the video screens above the train doors, or do I try to resist their call and gaze out the window at the swiftly passing scenery? There is something enjoyable in all of these choices, despite the monotony of the daily commute.

For Henri Lefebvre this complex set of interlocking patterns is what structures city life: the rhythms of the stars and the seasons, the rhythms of the workweek and broadcast media, the individual rhythms of daily life, and on down to the physiological rhythms of the body and its biological cycles. In Rhythmanalysis Lefebvre proposes four ways these overlaid rhythms can come together: (1) polyrhythmia refers to diverse rhythms occurring simultaneously without synthesis or interaction; (2) eurhythmia, in contrast, finds multiple rhythms sliding together in a kind of loosely syncopated assembly; (3) isorhythmia occurs when one single isolated rhythm imposes itself on all the others; and (4) arrhythmia refers to the opposite extreme, where individual cycles remain isolated and the larger environment dissolves into cacophony.2

These forms of rhythmic interaction each imply a particular form of social organization. Isorhythmia characterizes totalitarian attempts to bring diversity under the sway of a single authority, whereas a polyrhythmic society separates people into discreet channels with little influence on one another. An arrhythmic society has fallen out of sync and dissolves into chaos. Eurhythmia, meanwhile, envisions a society where individuals and groups can come together in shared space without eliding the differences between them.

In addition to these four different rhythmic relations, Lefebvre identifies two overall modes of urban temporality: the cyclical and the linear. Linear time is characterized by uniform repetition, the ongoing and endless ticking of the clock. This is the classic temporality of modernity, always pitched forward from past into future. But Lefebvre notes how cyclical time persists in many places, doing a different kind of work. We can find it, for example, in the hands of the analog station clocks circling around and around, in the shops and gates and doors opening and closing, and in the leisurely looping of the Nakano Station’s recorded birdsong.

Lefebvre notes how linear time can be transformed into cyclical time by giving it a meter and thus making it rhythmic: “Cycles invigorate repetition by cutting through it.”3 Rhythm makes repetition meaningful by introducing the capacity to move through it in various ways—literally opening up the aesthetic potential to dance alongside and within it. Cyclicality connects rationalized urban time with the rhythms of the body, the weather, and the patterns of a drifting consciousness. This introduction of rhythm results in the release of pleasurable energy in excess of the directed movement needed to get from point A to point B.4 In this way, Lefebvre writes, rhythms help compensate for the linearity of everyday modern life. Instead of everyone falling mechanically into isorhythmic lockstep or falling out of line into isolated polyrhythms or the chaos of arrhythmia, a spontaneous choreography emerges at the interstices of the city’s layered patterns, raising the possibility for individuated rhythms to prosper within a flexible overall orchestration. A eurhythmia of difference.

Staying Open to Other Rhythms

As they negotiate Nakano’s meters, no two persons move in the same way. Moving fluidly through the city demands an improvisational ability to open oneself to the diverse rhythms traversing the self. The navigation of interlocking rhythms provides a framework for coexistence among the millions of people, other creatures (crows, cockroaches, jellyfish), and other objects (trains, phones, sliding doors) sharing the tight spaces of urban Japan. This rhythmic conception of sociality makes little distinction between humans and other “more or less animate” bodies (including media objects). Everything engaging with rhythm participates in this shared environmental orchestration.5

Ambient subjectivation in this urban context consists of attunement to both the larger flows of the metropolis and the smaller flows moving within, without, above, and below the body. This is where ambient media comes in. By recasting urban rhythms in ambient forms more focused on biorhythmic attunement, ambient media serve as a training in how to sense and sway to the syncopated cycles emerging with every new mixture of people and place. Ambient media bring urban rhythms into circulation with aesthetic materials and through this blending locate points of attunement between them. To find a way to dance here amid the crowds is to resist falling back into the isorhythm of a sedimented social identity (of the state, of the company, of the family) and to resist tripping forward into the isorhythm of the isolated body, a form of social withdrawal radically severed from other cycles of life.

The arrival of more atomized, autonomous lifestyles was accompanied by a set of new media technologies both responding to and furthering these concerns. We have already considered the arrival of the Sony Walkman and the age of autonomous listening. Alongside the privatization of audio, however, came a concurrent privatization of the moving image with the rise of video. Portable video technology (beginning with the first Sony Portapak in 1967) allowed for a newly intimate relationship between body, camera, and screen.6 As the size of cameras and screens continued to shrink in subsequent decades, video came to slip ever more seamlessly into the routines of everyday life.

For some theorists this in itself symbolized a retreat from more pressing social issues. Video art was quickly identified as a practice tending toward “the aesthetics of narcissism,” as Rosalind Krauss described it in her influential early essay. Krauss describes video as providing a real-time, closed-circuit loop between the body of the artist and/or audience and the image of their self-regard.7 In this reading, video provides a way to turn the moving image away from the social and toward the self, recording the personal concerns of everyday life in isolation from any immediate impulse to communicate with others. In Japan, similarly, the rise of video has often been associated with a turn away from the social politics of the 1960s and toward an overriding concern with the self, particularly the everyday life and private struggles of the person behind the camera. Abé Mark Nornes notes a “retreat from the world” and a “turn to the self” in Japanese documentary beginning in the mid-1970s, in tandem with but generally even more apolitical than similar developments in Europe and America. For him and other critics, this marked the start of a “steady decline” in the state of Japanese cinema.8

We could point here to the counterexample of the early video collectives of the 1970s, which pushed for using video as a tool of collective social intervention in the model set out in Michael Shamberg’s Guerilla Television (1971). This call was taken up in Japan in Nakaya Fujiko’s Friends of Minamata Victims: A Video Diary (1972) and other works from the Video Hiroba (Video Commons) group. I want to suggest, however, there might also be a socially adaptive side to the use of video as a technology of the self. In this chapter I focus on the ambient use of video as a way of interfacing with the larger urban environment through personal, embodied rhythms. I suggest the rhythmic video interface serves as a different form of sociality, less discursive perhaps but no less important or necessary. Rather than a retreat from the world, my rhythmic approach understands the turn to ambient video as a practical way to tune the self within an urban sea of intersecting rhythms.

There is a socially adaptive side to ambient subjectivation: it atmospherically affords engagement with a wider range of environments and people, enabling movement through a diverse and complex world. Anxious commentary on social withdrawal in Japan often skips over this practical side of self-care, as if people were faced with a stark choice between identifying with the local community and culture or rejecting society and turning inward. But the guiding desire of ambient self-care is not to reject more traditional forms of belonging but to find other, more flexible modes of engaging the everyday, moving past the pressures and confines of a discreet identity and attuning to more impersonal flows. This freedom, for many part of the appeal of an impersonal metropolis like Tokyo, is not simply an illusion.

Commentary tends to focus, perhaps understandably, on cases where this desire for personal autonomy has gone to the extreme, past the loosening of social bonds and toward their complete dissolution. In response, prominent voices in Japan proclaim the need to unite around political and historical issues, whereas others call for the strengthening of local and national identities—both of which risk merely substituting one form of isorhythm for another. Reading a focus on the somatic as merely a slide into social withdrawal misunderstands the desire held by many to move beyond what might be oppressively narrow cultural norms and expectations, to find a way to move differently while still moving together.

This desire deserves to be taken seriously, for alongside its considerable risks, it simultaneously reaches toward an expanded circle of engagement, beyond the boundaries of family, nation, and species toward a more inclusive model of coexistence. I do not mean to suggest the serious issue of social withdrawal in Japan can be solved through somatic attunements alone—only that the ambient dimensions of subjectivity need to be taken into account when seeking to understand contemporary forms of urban sociality (or a lack thereof). Attending to rhythmic alignment is essential to any project hoping to enable communication and cooperation between disparate and diverse populations without collapsing their differences into a form of greater or lesser adherence to the local standard. Understanding ambient subjectivation demands attending to the complex dynamics of movement, rhythm, sensation, proprioception—the many ways material bodies encounter one another through space and time in ways irreducible to reflective forms of human identity and sociality.

Certainly, this dance is full of dangers, not only of inhibiting more direct forms of dialogue but also, as a number of critiques of multiculturalism have established, of overlooking how the capacity for physical belonging is itself dispersed across populations in highly uneven ways. As queer and disability theorists have described, social environments come already shaped by social norms, and those for whom an environment has been designed are going to have a much easier time moving through it. It is important not to idealize drift and movement in itself, as early ambient styles were wont to do. As Ahmed asks, “Is the subject who chooses homelessness and a nomadic lifestyle, or a nomadic way of thinking, one that can do so, because the world is already constituted as its home?”9 To put this a different way, does a Music for Airports belong only to the jet-set crowd? Further, as critics of neoliberalism often point out, the type of loose rhythmic alignment characteristic of the contemporary city is central to the just-in-time delivery structures of global capitalism.10 Sometimes, the hardest thing, as it often is in public space in Tokyo, is to just stay put.

The impersonality involved in ambient subjectivation also courts the danger of complete depersonalization: giving oneself over to larger social flows always at the same time raises the risk of losing the self in the process. The aspiration for impersonal mobility, over greater and greater areas, brings with it the risk of spreading oneself too thin, courting subjective collapse.11 The more complex and stratified a society becomes, the more difficult it is to reconcile personal rhythms with wider social flows.

As noted, the risk of falling outside society entirely has become a major concern in contemporary Japan, a reminder of just how difficult and emotionally taxing the constant navigation of these complex environments can become. Increasing numbers of people in Japan are unable to manage, falling into various degrees of social withdrawal. In the now widely publicized scenario of someone living isolated in their room, only the barest of external temporalities enters in—the abstracted time of the Internet and, if they are lucky, the rhythm of food being regularly deposited at their door by a relative or a delivery service. Even these cycles may break down, leading to the near absolute isorhythmia of those who die alone in their homes and are not found for weeks or even months—their participation in social rhythms already so curtailed their silence barely registers.12 The rising number of such cases in Japan reminds us of the cruel fate awaiting those who will not or cannot follow the demand to keep moving along.

This struggle for rhythmic alignment is precisely where ambient media seek to intervene. As Anna McCarthy notes in her work on the placement of television screens in urban space, a screen always encounters preexisting “webs of signification and material practice” at the same time as it “activates and embodies” heterogeneous forces of its own. The rhythmic approach I pursue here echoes McCarthy’s observations on how the placement of urban screens is always deeply political but also supports a great deal of “ideological flexibility.” Urban screens are “an apparatus capable of linking everyday locations and their subjects to wider, abstracted realms of commerce, culture, and control in any number of ways.”13

Without forgetting how ambience, itself, is subject to these heterogeneous forces, I want to draw attention to the adaptive side of rhythmic attunement in urban space, how mediated entrainment can help people navigate the speeds and slownesses of life in the city. Instead of denouncing the turn to the self and looking back wistfully to an earlier cultural moment (a common tendency in recent studies of postwar Japan), I propose a more pragmatic understanding of the mediated atmospheres of recent decades. The techniques of self-tuning described here remain an important part of the struggle to not fall back into more stratified rhythms, where the only choices are to fall in step with dominant social beats or not to join the dance at all.

Attuning to Ambient Video

The embodied social landscape of rhythmic sociality is precisely where ambient video intervenes. The rest of this chapter looks more closely at how ambient video mediates between the rhythms of the city and the rhythms of the body, opening up an aesthetic space for a flexible eurythmic interplay between them. If in the introduction I focused on the “air” as a social force, here I focus on the (audiovisual) waveforms moving through it and setting it in motion.

Experimental filmmakers have grappled with how to integrate urban rhythms into visual form as far back as the “city symphony” films of the 1920s.14 In Japan the immediate postwar decades saw filmmakers going out into the streets in greater numbers, as in documentaries produced by Iwanami Productions in the 1950s and independent features produced by the Art Theatre Guild in the 1960s. These efforts were aided by the arrival of lighter and more portable cameras and audio equipment. Meanwhile, the long history of “visual music” in experimental animation established many precedents for the use of visual materials to achieve rhythmic musical effects. Ambient video artists in Japan could also look to the strategies of seminal experimental landscape films like Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) and, more locally, Hagiwara Sakumi’s Kiri (Mist, 1972).15

Opportunities to present audiovisual materials also continued to diversify, from the public television viewing stations (gaitō terebi) of early postwar Japan to the expanded cinema movements of the 1960s and 1970s (themselves closely tied to the environmental art and intermedia movements described in chapter 1).16 By the late 1970s, major railroad conglomerates like Tōkyū, Tōbu, and Seibu began installing the first jumbo outdoor video screens outside their flagship department stores in high-traffic Tokyo hubs like Shibuya, Ikebukuro, and Roppongi. As screens continued to shrink in weight and cost while diversifying in size, video gradually became a familiar presence on public transportation and in restaurants, nightclubs, live houses, and other public spaces.17

Following the Japanese turn to ambience in the wake of the Eric Satie boom, new video genres emerged seeking to work directly on the atmospheres of everyday life. Commercial video producers quickly embraced the new genre of background video, or BGV, as a new tool of environmental mood regulation. A steady stream of BGV releases began appearing on VHS and laserdisc in the early 1980s and the flow has yet to cease. BGV producers continue to be early adopters of new video formats like DVD and Blu-Ray, in an eagerness to promise ever higher-resolution audiovisual moods. Common subjects include tropical islands, the Tokyo skyline at night, cherry blossoms, waterfalls, the moon and the stars, and creature-specific titles like Synforest’s Hitsuji ga suki (I like sheep, 2009) and the “healing jellyfish” described earlier.18 Taking their cues from commercial BGM, these works often present themselves as utilitarian tools of mood regulation, focused largely on relaxation and stress relief but also on providing atmospheres appropriate to show on screens in venues like upscale restaurants, hotels, and shopping malls.

Just as ambient music responded to more traditional forms of BGM by incorporating more ambiguity and ambivalence, video artists produced an ambient response to BGV. Drawing on the lineage of visual music and environmental cinema, the new ambient video sought out more flexible ways of tuning physical rhythms through the mediation of existing environments. As with ambient music, this allowed ambient video to synchronize more closely with the autonomous ideals of contemporary urban audiences.

The first proponents of ambient video in Japan were often visiting artists from abroad. Bill Viola lived in Japan for a year and half from 1980 to 1981 on a cultural exchange fellowship, spending time as the first artist in residence at Sony’s laboratory in Atsugi, Japan, and producing his landmark environmental video Hatsu-yume/First Dream (1981). Brian Eno came to Japan in the summer of 1983 to present Brian Eno: A World of Video Art and Environmental Music, a much discussed installation of ambient video and music at the newly built Laforet Museum, in the Laforet department store in Akasaka, Tokyo. This was followed by the release of Eno’s Sony-commissioned ambient video on VHS, the eighty-two-minute Thursday Afternoon (1984).19

Japanese video artist, painter and sculptor Yamaguchi Katsuhiro (1928–) began producing large-scale ambient video installations in Tokyo around the same time. Like Akiyama Kuniharu (discussed in chapter 1), Yamaguchi was a former member of the Experimental Workshop and the Environment Society. He was also a key member of Video Hiroba in the early 1970s. Following on the heels of Eno’s ambient video exhibition at Laforet, Yamaguchi began a series of what he called “artificial gardens” including Future Garden (1983) and Galaxy Garden (1986), each subtitled A Yamaguchi Katsuhiro Video Spectacle. The gardens were composed of numerous video monitors, later adding holography and lasers as well.20

Thanks to video, audiovisuals could increasingly be installed in an environment at low cost and, with the more recent advent of smartphones and tablet screens, carried directly on the body as well. As a result, audiovisual media is now woven through Japanese cities as never before, setting the stage for an increasingly ambient relationship with the moving image. Rather than assuming a viewer would sit down to face a screen for a fixed length of time, the ever-expanding range of video genres in the 1990s and 2000s began to favor more dispersed and flexible forms of attention: videos for urban screens and public transportation networks; short-form videos designed to stream over smartphones; and video art for hanging in galleries, filling store windows, and projecting outdoors onto the sides of buildings.21 Moving images could now mesh more finely with other rhythms of everyday life, opening up new possibilities for urban attunement. These new contexts often lent themselves to ambient forms of engagement, shifting fluidly between foreground and background forms of attention.

I now turn to examine a set of Japanese videos focusing on this interface between the rhythms of the body and the rhythms of contemporary urban life. Rather than consider the position of screens in urban space (a question well mapped in McCarthy’s Ambient Television), my focus here is on the rhythmic attunements produced within specific works of ambient video and how these patterns situate themselves in relation to the type of urban syncopations I have described.

Kick the World

A key example of early video art addressing Japan’s shifting rhythms is Kick the World, a 1974 video by Kawanaka Nobuhiro (1941–). Kawanaka was a member of Video Hiroba and an active proponent of experimental film and video in the 1970s. He went on to found what would become the main resource center for experimental film and video in Japan, Image Forum. Kick the World is his best-known work and has recently been featured in several retrospectives of early Japanese video art.22 The video consists of the artist holding a video camera with his hands and shooting his feet as he kicks an empty Coca-Cola can around a park full of scale replicas of famous international monuments. Kawanaka claims to have made the video in order to explore the newfound ability to record synchronous sound and video with a single machine—a technical capacity he exploits by recording the crunch of the tin can as his sandaled feet send it hurtling around the puddle-strewn park (Figure 8).

Over the course of the video’s twenty minutes, the sound of Kawanaka’s kicking frequently competes with the sound of a woman’s voice making announcements about the monuments on view, broadcast loudly across the park through a closed-circuit public address system. The video structurally documents the relationship between this solitary man with a camera, grunting as he aggressively if ineffectually kicks an empty aluminum corporate logo around a bunch of concrete monuments to power, and this faceless but composed female speaker, blanketing the space with official instructions for how this global simulacra should be approached. Kick the World stages this unequal dialogue between the female announcer, positioned as an invisible but aggressive reminder of who owns the space, and the man with the video camera, flailing in his attempt to register the sound of his own bodily attack upon the acoustic horizon of this corporatized world.

Electroacoustic composer Barry Truax, one of the original researchers behind the World Soundscape Project in the 1970s, defines the acoustic horizon as “the most distant sounds that may be heard in a soundscape.”23 He draws particular attention to whether an environment is quiet enough for sounds made by the listener’s own body to be audible. If it is not, the acoustic horizon can be said to have shrunk below the size of the listener’s body, resulting in a sensory estrangement from the physical self. In this regard, we can understand Kawanaka’s repeated kicking as a way to try and reestablish the acoustic horizon of his own physical agency against the blanketing isorhythm of the public address system.

Visually, the work also sets up conditions for Kawanaka to register his physical impact upon the surrounding “world”: the camera in his hands follows the impact of his body as it comes into contact with the can, launching it into the wider world and the image’s depth of field. In this way, Kawanaka’s performance seeks out a place for his own physical rhythms within the louder sonic disciplining of this heavily regulated space. But his efforts result only in a failure of syncopation. The stumbling rhythm of Kawanaka’s kicks cannot connect with the impartial announcements emerging from the loudspeakers, and his roving camera cannot soften the cold concrete of the miniature monuments on view.

The Age of Ambient Video

A less oppositional approach to environmental attunement is taken by Arai Man (1946–), a prize-winning novelist; a producer for the leading Japanese advertising company, Dentsū; a singer-songwriter of nostalgic easy-listening pop songs; and one of the most active early proponents of ambient video in the 1980s. Arai began producing ambient video after ten years as a producer of television commercials in a message-dense visual style he describes as “the informational equivalent of condensed milk.” He convinced Dentsū to let him produce a series of what he called kankyō bideo (literally “environmental video”) works, which the company released on VHS, videodisc, and laserdisc.24 Kankyō bideo might also justifiably be translated as “ambient video,” given kankyō ongaku (environmental music) was the then-current translation of Eno’s “ambient music” and Arai directly acknowledges Eno’s influence. Arai’s dozen or so ambient video releases focus on Japanese nature scenes, including Mt. Fuji, cherry blossoms at Lake Biwa, waterfalls in Minowa, and cedars in Wakayama, as well as settings outside Japan like an early morning on Tiananmen Square, the Grand Canyon, the shores of the Ganges in Benares, and a coral reef in Micronesia. In his 1990 book promoting the style, Kankyō bideo no jidai (The age of ambient video), he describes it as “a friend always by your side and easy to get along with; a new media for people living in the city” (29).

Arai recalls background video puzzling Japanese viewers at first but notes how before long BGV could be found in many locations, including department stores, airports, museums, hospital waiting rooms, bank lobbies, cafés, and bars. What unites all these places, Arai argues, is that the people visiting them do not have time for storytelling. The nonnarrative, unstructured time of environmental video functions regardless of length of stay. It works well in retail settings, he notes, allowing shopkeepers to casually establish an atmosphere while folding newcomers easily into the already established mood (28–29).

Arai’s ambient videos from the 1980s are unique in their structuralist austerity, bringing what could have been rather straightforward BGV into the more affectively ambiguous realm of the ambient. Arai’s ambient works are governed by a strict set of rules he set for himself. Each landscape must be captured in real time. No camera movement is allowed, and the final product must consist of one extended take. If possible, the soundtrack should contain only synch environmental sound. There should be no humans in the shot and no major changes in the image from beginning to end. Anything overtly dramatic should be avoided (13–14). This elimination of dramatic interest is strategically oriented toward a particular type of viewing experience. Arai writes:

BGV doesn’t demand to be seen or heard. In most cases, it has no beginning or end, and only rarely does a figure appear. If we were to compare it to something, it is close to furniture that sits quietly in a room. We could say it resembles curtains, flooring, or wallpaper. Ultimately it erases your own appearance, dissolving you into the atmosphere—this is what BGV does. (8)

Here, Arai echoes Erik Satie’s notion of furniture music, envisioning video “furnishings” effortlessly blending with the visual landscapes of everyday life, easing viewers’ self-consciousness and masking lulls in the dinner conversation. While he references BGV in general here, it is clear by Arai’s references to Satie and Eno and his austere working methods he wishes to push background video in a more ambient direction.

Arai refers to his works as “video hanging scrolls,” or “twenty-first-century landscape paintings” (21-seiki no sansuiga), associating ambient video with the nature paintings traditionally hung in the alcove (toko no ma) of Japanese homes. He describes living with a video and gradually attuning to its rhythms:

Sometimes I let one of my BGV of Japanese landscapes play all day. Once in a while I look over at it. Sometimes I do something else. When I get tired of that I start watching it again. . . . There is no need to stare at it for an hour or two at a stretch. Just like there is no one who would sit and stare at a hanging scroll, there is no need to watch BGV continuously. If you did, it might actually be a little dangerous. . . . Just try letting some BGV run. Live with it like a Japanese landscape painting hanging somewhere in your room. Once in awhile you look at it, at other times you don’t. But as you live your life, you feel it somewhere there in the back of your mind. If you do this, I think you will achieve a balanced mind and body. You might call it one way to provide a sense of equilibrium. (18)

Arai writes of the ability of his largely unaltered long takes to reunite time and space, even when not consciously attended to. The various rhythms of everyday life are collected and organized through the continuous time of the video as its audiovisual rhythms spread through and tune the surrounding atmosphere (a variation on the “absolute background” described in chapter 2). By affording an open rhythmic interplay between the discontinuous attention of the viewer and the slowly changing video environment, Arai’s ambient videos work toward eurythmic attunement between audiences’ psychosomatic rhythms and the mediated atmospheres within which they dwell.

+Intersection

In the new century an increasing number of Japanese video artists are producing ambient works for gallery and museum display as well as for use in advertising, in-store displays, music videos, and concert background visuals. Ise Shōko (1969–), for example, began her solo art practice in 1998, producing album designs and photography for Speedometer, Takayama Jun’s solo ambient electronic music project.25 She went on in the early 2000s to branch out into music videos and motion graphics backgrounds, first for the clothing brand Carhartt and later for a wide range of bands, including Yellow Magic Orchestra and associated projects like HASYMO and Pupa. She continues to produce both photography and design work alongside her video productions, and these still formats often become source material for the video works.

Ise can be understood as part of the most recent generation of eizō sakka (moving image creators), whose software-based video work increasingly overlaps with the fields of motion graphics, video art, animation, and computer-aided design.26 Whereas Arai’s ambient videos took a hands-off approach to the slowly changing landscapes in front of the camera, ambient video in recent decades works more toward the gradual transformation of the digitally composited image. This younger generation of ambient video artists uses software effects to build new rhythms into the existing environments captured by the camera, reinterpreting found rhythms and introducing new movement possibilities. Through these software interventions, the works open up a creative space in between the rapidly fluctuating patterns of urban life and the parallel rhythms of human physiology and mood.

Negotiating these flows is the central focus of Ise’s +Intersection, an installation curated by Hatanaka Minoru for Pepper’s Loft Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo (December 2002).27 The multichannel work features a series of urban landscapes in motion, including railroad tracks viewed from a moving train, overhead highways and streetlights viewed looking up from an (unseen) moving vehicle, flamingos mingling at the local zoo, views of windblown pine tree branches and cloudy skies, and the occasional bridge and building seen from a boat passing below them. Five English-language phrases repeat as superimposed titles throughout the series, outlining the relation of the videos to the everyday rhythms they engage:

Taken together, these five statements outline the ways Ise’s work mediates between the audiovisual rhythms of the city and the routine flows of everyday existence. The urban landscapes visible in the series document the banal repetition of contemporary urban life while working to transform this same tedium into a source of energy (Figure 9). Paired with Speedometer’s downtempo beats, the videos generate a looser ambient relation to these familiar urban rhythms, allowing a more eurythmic “world” to come into view.

Much of Ise’s work begins with her videotaping movement and visual patterns discovered in environments near her home city of Takarazuka (near Osaka): urban infrastructure, animals at the zoo, forests full of fog. As with many in her generation of ambient video artists, Ise’s process begins on location with a kind of videographic rhythmanalysis: she seeks out spontaneous patterns created by automobiles, animals, machines, and pedestrians while moving in and around her immediate environment. This use of the video camera has close parallels not only to on-location filmmaking but also to street photography and “found sound” musical composition.28 As noted earlier, this type of on-location engagement soon became possible for video artists as well, with the development of smaller, lighter, and more discreet video cameras.

Ambient video like Ise’s bring to this tradition an increased focus on mood and an emphasis on the affective potentials of attunement with found rhythms. Both the music and the editing of +Intersection are structured around the loop and the repeated gesture. Most segments are built around a pulsing rhythm and a gradual ebb and flow. Sonically, the beats tend toward a slow tempo, often 70 bpm or lower. These rhythms organize a looser flow of vocal samples and synthesizer textures. Visually, the pacing is calm without losing forward momentum. Speedometer’s beats often fall away just as the images shift toward the ethereal, as concrete roads give way to an expansive view of the sky.

The relation of these edited rhythms to the existing rhythms of the city is more subtle than simply opposing “slowness” to “speed,” however. As Lefebvre emphasizes, humans always register rhythms in relation to other rhythms, particularly the rhythms of the human body:

A rhythm is only slow or fast in relation to other rhythms with which it finds itself associated in a more or less vast unity. . . . Every more or less animate body and a fortiori every gathering of bodies is consequently polyrhythmic, which is to say composed of diverse rhythms, with each part, each organ or function having its own in a perpetual interaction which constitutes a set (ensemble) or a whole (un tout).29

Ise organizes the edited rhythms of the videos around the rhythms visible in her footage of found movement: water rippling, windmills rotating, elevators rising and falling, automobiles rolling smoothly along raised highways. This ensemble of rhythms, both found and fabricated, serves to syncopate the landscapes of everyday life with the rhythms of the viewing body, adding energy to the “tedious repetition.”

Summer Afternoon

Ise’s Summer Afternoon (2001) demonstrates this process of ambient rejuvenation with great clarity. The visuals consist of a series of partial views of a large, green urban park, with clues here and there in the sky and foliage that a summer storm is approaching. The text (presented in English, subtitled in Japanese) describes a leisurely summer day in the life of someone living with a cat in an apartment near the park. The narrator—never on-screen and present only through the superimposed titles—ponders various topics, walks to the store to buy a few things, encounters random passersby, and considers the day’s news. The titles also provide a series of lists, including what the narrator purchased and how much it cost:

• Razor ¥560, shaving cream ¥700,
• two packets of cigarettes ¥500,
• five cans of cat food ¥900.

Later, there is a similar list of the narrator’s wandering thoughts and the time spent on each:

• Convenience store robber shouldn’t pay compare to its risk. (5 min.)
• That record shop is too noisy with loud music to chose records taking time. (30 sec.)
• About the internal organ transplantation. (2 min.)
• About equality of men and women. (4 sec.)

This is followed by some thoughts on how “this country is deeply in debt” and yet “people go to the rock music festival paying ¥80,000 for the ticket in this country.”30 Passing thoughts float by—a world made up equally of slow elevators, cat food, weather patterns, and social trends (Figure 10). This is not a dramatic world, but neither is it an unpleasant one. The series of images of the park (uninhabited except for a few out-of-focus humans seen at a distance) provides a relaxed, lush setting for these wandering thoughts. The narrator’s mention of various smells and sensations (water, the potential for rain, the heat) infuses the ordered yet abundant greenery of the images.

Paired with these visuals is Speedometer’s easygoing downtempo instrumental hip-hop, matching these drifting thoughts with a relaxed, head-nodding beat. The rhythm gives this summer afternoon its bounce. Late in the piece, a sample of a local southern Japanese weather report surfaces, tying the soundtrack to the rainy-season storm gathering on-screen.

As with most ambient video, the world presented in Summer Afternoon is largely a solitary one, to the extent it is inhabited at all. The narrator remains unseen, and the only social exchange (indirectly recalled) is a brief encounter with a tattooed man in the elevator of the narrator’s apartment building. The rest of the world is mediated through the radio and newspaper headlines. The world of the video consists of a cat, a park, a bridge or two—a world along the lines of Wallace Stevens’s “two or three hills and a cloud.” The only tension here is the lingering tension before a summer rainstorm, made pleasurable through the breezy downtempo mood of the music. The world of the video seems circumscribed, and yet, by interweaving these different encounters, the work opens onto a wider landscape registering the interplay between distant news, weather patterns, organ transplants, gender equality, and the physiological rhythms of humans and cats. Everything is woven together in a summertime ambience, and this atmosphere moves through the gallery to shape viewers’ bodies in turn.

Apoptosis

Ambient video continued to develop new ways of mediating the city in tandem with the transition toward software-based media production. As the power and accessibility of motion graphics software like Adobe’s After Effects continued to increase, both the visual and auditory rhythms of urban space were further opened to digital reconstruction, resulting in both new forms of ambient mediation and expanded phenomenological horizons.

Like Ise, Tsuchiya Takafumi (1979–) is a contemporary eizō sakka working in a wide range of contexts simultaneously. Tsuchiya’s Apoptosis (2008) is an ambient music video produced for Japanese electronic music producer Caelum (Tsukahara Kōtaro). The visuals are based on a simple but ingenious effect of wrapping the horizontal axis of a set of found landscapes around itself, collapsing the horizon into a point in the center of the screen. When the footage is set in motion, the now circular image creates a kaleidoscopic effect. These rotating landscapes are accelerated and decelerated, slipping and transforming as they spin, generating the impression of different horizons alternately being sucked into and pushed out from the center of the frame (Figure 11).

At times, these landscapes appear to be pouring forth from the screen itself and, at other times, to be literally going down the drain. This allows audiences only an ambivalent connection to each fleeting environment. The pace shifts over the course of the piece, allowing glimpses of a more subdued natural environment slipping away while letting loose a more accelerated whirlpool of electrified cityscapes. As with the phenomenon of apoptosis in biology, the process of cell death occurring as part of an organism’s growth and development, the landscapes here slip away only to give rise to new horizons in turn. The movement within each environment matches up with the rhythms of the software-controlled spinning and compositing, filtering the different visual patterns together into an open and affectively ambiguous mix.

Caelum’s music matches the ambivalent mood of this environmental death and rebirth. Appearing on his 2008 album Weather Report, the track is characteristic of Japanese electronica from the mid-2000s: somber piano chords pedaling slowly under an effervescent flurry of glitchy percussion in the higher registers. While the restless arpeggios, skidding loops, and frothy feedback layers provide a brightly enthralling foreground, tickling the ears with lots of microsonic detail, the much slower cycling of the low end underpins this activity with a far more subdued foundation. As with Tsuchiya’s visuals, the frenetic foreground motion is set against a somber atmospheric background—an unresolved tension characteristic of recent ambient media’s ambivalent feelings toward the ongoing transformation of the urban landscape. Apoptosis hints at nostalgia for a slower-paced environment at the same time as it indulges in a headlong rush toward new sensations. The video attempts to integrate these contrary desires by allowing the shape of the video itself to be the ambiguous point around which everything revolves. The encompassing horizon has become the vanishing point.

rheo: 5 horizons

The digital remediation of urban rhythms is taken even further by Kurokawa Ryōichi’s rheo: 5 horizons (2010), this chapter’s final example of ways ambient video rethinks the physical encounter between self and environment. Kurokawa is known for his installations and concert performances in which abstract audiovisual materials are subject to digital transformation. He often crosses sound and video signals so visual image data help sculpt the soundtrack and sound waves guide what transpires on-screen. The rheo “time sculpture” was shown in a dark room with five large-screen plasma displays at the Japan Media Arts Festival at the National Art Center in Tokyo in 2011, and there is also a three-channel concert version. The title, rheo, means “to flow” or “to stream” in Greek.

Rheo won the Golden Nica prize for Digital Music and Sound Art at the 2010 ARS Electronic Festival in Austria, the most important international competition for media art. In his acceptance speech for the prize, Kurokawa describes attempting with this work to enhance his audience’s ability to spatially locate objects through sound by synchronizing audio input with moving visual cues.31 The bending of the horizons on-screen directly echoes the contours of the soundtrack, creating a powerful synesthetic effect (Figure 12). This complexity is underpinned by the droning sound of the shō, the Japanese mouth organ used in gagaku and a range of contemporary music. Here, the shō provides a droning foundation for fluctuating layers of digital noise. Both the shō and the noise move in synesthetic unison with the shifting visual horizons.

Mapping the visual landscape onto the “flowing” properties of digital sound produces new sensory possibilities for rhythmic orientation. While the sonic mapping of cities has been an object of research ever since the World Soundscape Project began mapping Vancouver “soundmarks” in the 1970s, little attention has been paid to sound as an alternate means of spatial navigation, a different perceptual horizon for movement through a landscape. Hosono Haruomi once noted one of the unique things about the contemporary Tokyo landscape is that due to the absence of a grid system and the way the preponderance of tall buildings tends to block out what might otherwise have served as orientating landmarks (such as Mt. Fuji, Tokyo Tower, or Sky Tree), there is little sense of a stable background against which urban life transpires. Instead, people have the sense of being immersed in a fluid and malleable environment with constantly shifting horizons.32 This orientational instability is close to that found in a densely tangled jungle environment—one of the reasons jungle crows love Tokyo so much. When the visual field becomes this complex, sound serves as an important alternate channel for humans to locate themselves in space.

Kurokawa describes rheo as an attempt to render the dynamic sonic energy of these uncertain horizons into a more sensible mediated form. The work provides an immersion in the complex and sliding rhythms of five shifting landscapes and uses digital techniques to synesthetically blur the boundaries between sight and hearing, the inner rhythms of the body and the outer rhythms of the mediated world.

It might seem strange to think of video as an atmosphere, since the moving image has traditionally served as a medium demanding more focused attention. As ambient video exemplifies, however, part of what happens to the image in the postindustrial period is a general reversal of the dominance of vision over sound, with sound now often taking priority as the organizational driver of audiovisual experience.33 One reason for the increasing importance of sound, I propose, is the more flexible modes of attention and focus it allows. To return to the original meaning of ambi- discussed in the introduction, it is easier for a sound to “surround on both sides” than it is for a visual image. Yet ambient media is never simply a privileging of hearing over vision: the new emphasis on sonic atmospheres is paired with new styles of visual display as well, emphasizing modes that can register on the body even in peripheral vision. Consider, for example, the short video advertisements playing on the video screens now commonly installed above each set of sliding doors inside Japanese trains: silent so as not to be too intrusive; short and rapidly edited so as to support and sustain varied levels of attention; and streaming on an endless loop just above eye level in the most conspicuous place in the train. In cases like this, a rhythmic visual style serves as way to allow audiences more freedom to determine their own modes of attunement and allows moving-image media to blend more seamlessly into existing environments. By modulating the shifting body rather than engaging the focused mind, both BGV and ambient video adapt to the competing attentional demands of the city. But while BGV most often seeks to sell products or provide utilitarian moods, ambient video responds to this situation by seeking out more expansive forms of urban attunement.

As DeNora writes, understanding the varied ways physical embodiment meshes with environmental materials provides a different way of understanding sociality, one helping to dissolve the seeming opposition between self and environment or, in this case, care for the self and engagement with a broader world: “The body—its limits, processes, capacities, thresholds—is reconceived as an emergent and flexible entity, as reflexively linked to the material–cultural environment and what that environment may afford. . . . The body/environment divide can be replaced by a concern with how ‘bodies’ are configured.”34 Seeing embodiment as emerging with and through environmental forms of attunement provides a much better sense of what is at stake with ambient subjectivation. While turning away from the discursive, ambient video engages the social at the level of atmospheric affordances and environmental agency. By approaching the city through the eurythmic potentials of rhythm, ambient video functions as a technology for tinkering with how the self might dance with and through the complex cadences of contemporary life.