RYOICHI KUROKAWA

Winner of the Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for Digital Music and Sound Art, the installation rheo: 5 horizons by Ryoichi Kurokawa could be defined as a temporal audiovisual sculpture which runs on an 8-minute loop. Composed of five vertical monitors and five speakers, rheo: 5 horizons fuses HD video footage of landscapes and digitally generated materials. Kurokawa’s distinctive feature is the transfiguration and fusion of images and real sounds, which act a representation of how the brain and man’s memory reconstruct sensory perceptions. Hence the title Rheo, inspired by the words Panta Rei or Rhei (everything flows) of Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus who claimed you can never step into the same river twice: like a perceptive flow, the chaotic flow of Rheo’s images and sounds merge into an ambiguous and mutable experience from which “more realistic” images emerge, as if from an unconscious memory.

The audiovisual expression of rheo aims at eliminating the distinction between virtual and real images, between seeing and hearing, between ambiguous and clear: his digital bravura and precision in execution coexist with minimalism and complexity, a line of thought which connects many Japanese contemporary art events.
The art of Kurokawa, a Japanese artist, assumes multiple forms, from installations to recordings to concerts. In recent years, his works have been welcomed in museums and festivals worldwide, such as: Tate Modern, Venice Biennale, Transmediale, and Sonar.

TECHNIQUE

Five flat-panel monitors and five multi-channel speakers: each monitor is paired with a mono-channel sound and each video is synchronized with each audio. Thus, they are juxtaposed in line like a five member ensemble and they behave as five independent audiovisual apparatuses.
concept, direction, composition, programming by Ryoichi Kurokawa production Cimatics co-production Maison des Arts de Créteil, Le Manège Shot w/Canon XL-H1