parcel and NEORT++ are pleased to present, Univocity of Mediation: Beautiful Medium, a co-hosted solo exhibition by Tokyo-based artist Goki Muramoto.
Goki Muramoto explores the concept of "mediation"—including perception, communication, and movement—through the act of inventing and sculpting his own unique "medium." This exhibition marks Muramoto’s first solo show to present multiple works simultaneously, showcasing three of his representative series: Imagraph, Lived Montage, and Training Wheels. Together, these works propose the art that Muramoto refers to as "Medium-Art."
Everything moves through something. Listening to another sound—one that what is mediating makes, only by mediating, only while mediating—amidst the loud sound of what is mediated, Marshall McLuhan called the medium the message. Somewhere along the way, my body was also vibrating with this sound, and I realized that it was something I could also make.
My task is to make a beautiful medium. Meine Aufgabe ist es, ein schönes Medium zu schaffen.
This exhibition introduces three media works that each engage vision in distinct ways— Imagraph, a projector that presents video to closed eyes through the eyelids; Lived Montage, a pair of glasses that cinematically shares the field of vision with another viewer seeing the same thing; and Training Wheels, a ring that compels the viewer to look at the world through the lens of a predetermined belief expressed in a single sentence— and propose Medium-Art itself.
Imagraph is an optical apparatus that projects motion pictures onto closed eyes through the eyelids. The viewer lies down on a bed with their eyes closed. A video—preprocessed to shift the skin tone of the participant toward a bluish tint—is projected so that the intended colors, arrangements, and motions are conveyed to the closed eye. At this moment, the eyelids become the medium for precisely what they are supposed to reject. Under the privileged condition of closed eyes, the projected light melds with unconscious visual imagery and shares its textures, blurring the boundary between what is being shown and what is not. In the exhibition space, in addition to the area where Imagraph can be experienced, a curated set of materials and small works titled after-study for Imagraph will be presented—these are not studies for producing the work, but studies conducted afterward in order to understand the work (as media). Named after an apparatus for writing (in) images, this medium interrogates the freedom we possess about the image, both as sender and receiver, through a strange visual experience that evokes the origin of the image itself.
Lived Montage is a goggle-type device designed to reconstruct cinematic montage as a form of perception. The device is equipped with cameras and binocular displays, and projects a cinematic image—created by editing all participants’ original fields of vision in real time—onto each participant’s eyes. The participants observe and act within the space through this vision, and gradually become accustomed to this new perceptual form. In this exhibition, a version will be demonstrated in which the views of all who have looked at the same thing are switched in sync with their heartbeats. As a dynamically transforming collective body and abstract spatial awareness are formed, a fundamental question is posed about the structure of vision: "What sees what?"
Training Wheels is a modest yet evocative series of works composed of perforated brass discs, each paired with a corresponding instruction. The hand-polished discs are accompanied by instructions such as, “See (something), believing that every color is emitted by itself,” or “See (something), believing that everything has touched everything.” While viewing the surrounding scenery through the disc, the viewer is required to follow these instructions. This series, which performs the act of instruction—imagine...—on the level of media itself, embodies most succinctly Muramoto’s artistic stance of treating the medium as the artwork. It invites the viewer to undertake an active effort of seeing, through which existing relationships are dramatically transformed.
The exhibition title Univocity of Mediation: Beautiful Medium refers to the idea that mediation, which renders media as media, is spoken of in the same single sense with regard to everything it addresses. With reference to the concept of the univocity of being, originally posed by John Duns Scotus in the theological discourse concerning the possibility of speaking about God, and later reconstructed by Gilles Deleuze as a plane where difference itself is affirmed, He seeks to explore his artistic language—his "voice"—within the mediological difference between univocal mediation and the various media, and within the difference between being and mediation.
In response to Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, “the medium is the message,” Muramoto straightforwardly affirms that “writing this message as a poem” is his most natural form of expression, and he refers to the art of doing so as “Medium-Art.” This exhibition marks the first occasion on which Muramoto, who has been attempting to trace the latent genealogy of this art, presents a radical figure of the “Medium-Artist” through his own body of works and media.
Planning：parcel, NEORT++
Curatorial cooperation: Kaori Tada
Support: Inami-Monnai Laboratory, The University of Tokyo, THE PROJECT TO SUPPORT EMERGING MEDIA ARTS CREATORS
Special Thanks: Masaki Fujihata, Yuiko Fujita, Nae Morita, Daisuke Harashima, Katsuhiko Mizuno, Minoru Hatanaka, Masahiko Inami, Kai Fukubayashi, Karin Suwazono
