TOTAL LIVING INDUSTRY

@ Rebound

Double Channel Video, 23 min. Shown at the exhibition "Rebound", curated by Hitomi Hasegawa, Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan, 2001

The installation deals with the question of identity-formation and image-production in an emerging new urban culture and lifestyle – the TOTAL LIVING INDUSTRY of private city-developments like TAMA DEN EN TOSHI located in the southwestern suburbs of Tokyo. It focusses on the visual culture and narratives built up around a specific territory, which is connected to the center of Tokyo by TOKYU’s first development, the railway line. Nowadays the company controls almost every aspect of daily urban life in a certain territory – from living to transportation, to television, to leisure... The structure of the videos is based on the perception and rhythms of a trainride from the suburbs into the center, where all the elements of TOKYU's visual culture intervene and overlap into the spatial surfaces. the question is, how space is defined and controlled by the elaborate production of narratives, movements and images and how therefore the "real" material suburban structure becomes more and more a neatly built, preproduced image of itself.

The installation (re)constructs a segment of the train, which constitutes the key figure of the daily experienced narrations. Two videos address two distinct perspectives on the phenomenon. While one appears as a documentary mapping the flows of people through the territory and uses material shot in Tama, the other video shows the same narrative structure by using fictional elements like mangas, television, promotion material and videogames.