Survival System Train and other Sculpture
Shirley Shor & Aviv Eyal, 1998
Kenji Yanobe, Center on Contemporary art, Seattle, Washington
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"To a certain extant, the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe already foreshadowed the scale of the major accident of tomorrow. Indeed, while radioactivity was able to circulate with impunity from East to West, contaminating entire continents in passing, the electromagnetic transmission system of the Interactivity of future information super-highways is part of the same phenomenon of global reach" |
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Paul Virillio, Open Sky |
Yanobe is a next-generation Japanese artist whose works are visually stylized upon manga (animation, comics and fantasy culture). The exhibition space is filled with very impressive sculptures: Live size radiation proof suits (complete with Geiger Counters ), Strange Machines, Railway tracks and installations that seem to be modeled in the Raven computer game techno-object styling tradition. Analog, heavy, noisy and rusty steel machines that contain personal emergency-condition storage space and hideaway. Various operational instrumentation covers the mechanical machines skin. Personalized in-suit panels and levers control some of the accessories. The works are semi-interactive: one needs to learn how to operate these hybrids, and the only person that holds this ‘driving license’ is the artist himself. Sometimes, the prostheses are supposed to protect its users (The “Yellow suit”), sometimes they are war-machines rhizomes used to conquer (The “Godzilla”) and sometimes they may be used in meditation and balancing (“Tanking machine”).
Walking up-and-down the gallery, one gets the feeling of being in a playground/amusement/theme-park that is filled with large colorful active toys. The technology seems magical – like the one we encounter in some science-fiction literature… But the pictures that decorate the gallery’s walls remind us of actual pressing 20th century ecological and cultural issues like Chernobyl, technology’s negative social impact, nuclear contaminated environment and biological weapons. The pictures portray the Artist, Yanobe – all dressed up for the occasion and for the location in his protective yellow suit, walking around some of Chernobyl affected sites (Deserted pre-school, amusement park, MI-24 helicopters cemetery) – Measuring radiation with personalized Geiger-enabled gear. The works leads us to reflect on the linkage between art and technology and on the persons who creates and operates art and technology.
In midst of the magical colorful and technological whirlwind, Yanobe warns us about the danger of improper use of technology. Technology in-itself has no intrinsic moral value, it’s not good or bad; it all depends on how we use it. Yanobe is interested in inventing machines. He tries to adapt them to would-be future disasters. For him, this adaptation is a sort of survival game. We think that the actual art-making process is the survival process.