air-japan

late autumn and my six months are over. they passed so incredibly fast i cannot believe it. but i guess that's a sign of me having had a brilliant and productive time. thanks to staff and students. i'll miss ogaki.

after my two performances at Make: Tokyo Meeting 02, i had some time to retrace my steps in this metropolis. visiting the same places, taking the same pictures.

now and then...

now and then...

but i also made some new acquaintances: plastic food town / kappabashi street...

the ice man...

window cleaners...

one peaceful place. specially sesshu's beautiful zen-garden of joueiji temple.

'a place of sonic beauty'

also yamaguchi is a city of hot springs (onsen) and new media art (ycam). a very good combination.

one crazy place. so big, so impossible to grasp. traffic, air pollution, very many and very high buildings.

sweet potatoes.

tai chi morning.

maglev train station. 300km/h to the airport.

tokyo is a tough city. very high buildings, very many people and very tired office workers near the end of the week.

tokyo subway just before closing hour... men in business uniform spread out all over. too tired or too drunk to go home.

this would never happen in europe... (out of order note (i think) on a clock in this small park)

lunch, tokyo opera building, 54th floor...

today fire emergency practice day at iamas. finally i got to see one of these fire boxes/cabinets in action.

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a great reason to put on uniforms and bring out the megaphone. there's one uniform of every occasion it seems.

despite this i was a little bit disappointed - no special effects or smoke machines. everybody kept calm and the dummy didn't bounce when they used the defilibrator on its chest.

the defilibrator looks like a speak&spell. it also talks to you and instructs you how to connect the cables - in japanese only. i'd love to circuit bend one of these.

silly toys are everywhere. everything should be cute and should have a mascot/icon. even serious institutions like banks and insurance companies can't help but to use little characters where ever possible. my favourite is a local bank here in ogaki that uses the paddington bear as logo - for no apparent reason and probably without copyright clearance.
here's a video of a very funny present i got from ap&bi. tack så mycket.

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last night's activity outside my house...

a fire patrol rehearsal (i think). i enjoyed watching it more like a modern dance piece. it went on for a full hour and looked very strange. it seemed more important how you moved than what you did. as you can see in the video clips below, when they actually roll out the hoses it's very quick and efficient. but then they spend a lot of time rehearsing this odd positioning. nice choreography in any case. i really wonder how it works out in a real-life fire/chaos/danger situation.

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