Media as Singularities — Symposium and video feedback performance by Masayuki Kawai at NYU

“Media as Singularities”
Symposium and video feedback performance by Masayuki Kawai 
at NYU Einstein Auditorium, 34 Stuyvesant St, New York, NY 10003
Sun, March 6 at 4pm – 6pm.
map https://goo.gl/maps/Qmc8sz5kgZr

 

We begin with Masayuki Kawai and Daisuke Harashima (University of Tokyo) discussing Media as Singularities then a feedback performance by Kawai. Then, Zhen Zhang of NYU Tisch Cinema Studies and Tom Looser from East Asian Studies at NYU will join to talk about Kawai’s work.

It is open to public and free of charge.

Symposium/lecture:
USA: Tom Looser (NYU)

Zhen Zhang (NYU)
Japan: Daisuke Harashima (University of Tokyo)

Masayuki Kawai (video artist)

Video Feedback Live Performance by Masayuki Kawai:

Masayuki Kawai builds a video feedback system composed of dozens of analog audio-visual devices. He shows the machine on site as an installation and operates it as live performance as well. Kawai’s “Video Feedback” works are made with an analog video feedback from a closed circuit system with free-flowing electronic data. No outer video/sound source is used; the video machines and circuits contain subtle noises that are amplified in the loop to generate infinite data flows. When these are put into the video input, they display various figure and colour mutations. When these are channeled into the audio input, they make sounds that are synchronized with the image. It is impossible to make these images and sounds by computer programing-simulation because the digital process eliminates the noise and gives privilege to the signals. Thus, through these works, we directly experience an organic creation of singularity with analog electronic video.

About Media as Singularities

Flush with emergencies, probabilities and preemptions, is the situation under control or out of control? Shock, noise, accident, event, etc., any such exceptional anomaly now seems to be captured by the networks to improve their flexible, robust and sustainable creativities of the self-controlling collective security against frightening unknowable aliens.
A conceptual observation of glitch, however, would provide another view; glitch, not as an error, but as a rhythm of recursive generation of a pattern, which is simultaneously singular and multiple. This paradoxical concept of glitch envisions the real and virtual power of a non-digital and in-formal logic as the potential of the technological environment. It is not simply a break cutting into a connection or opening a hole into a containment. It is not statistical digital uncertainty of unpredictable contingencies or the coming transcendental future. On the contrary, it is a sensation of immaterial materialities of the networks to metamorphose their process of auto-production. They are the conditions of the possibilities of the techno-political ecology. This rhythm is felt resonance of autonomous-and-heteronomous vibrations of the living singularities.
An ethico-aesthetic task of media as singularities is to construct a sensor for these living singularities, transducing them into the sensible as an existing alternative track: Media, the immanent future.

Masayuki Kawai

http://masayukikawai.com/

Live performance footage

https://youtu.be/cN6XjpzFYBQ

FB event page https://www.facebook.com/events/976921435722894/