Amoeba City: SchoolNite: The New Museum's Festival of Ideas for the New City

Saturday, May 7th, 6pm – 4am & Sunday, May 8th, 12pm – 6pm,
at 233 Mott Street, NYC. corner of Mott and Prince. 3rd floor.

Works include:

Chris Marker's Tokyo Days (1988, video, sound, color, 20 min)
Tomonari Nishikawa's Yamanote Loop (2010, 16mm, sound, color, 15 min)
Shinkan Tamaki's One Record on December (2007, 16mm, silent, 6.5 min)

In The Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes, fascinated by Tokyo’s semiological density, wrote: “this city cannot be known except through some sort of ethnographic activity: you need to find your bearings [...] by walking its streets, by looking around you, through habit and experience: each discovery is both intense and fragile.”

Conceiving of filmmaking as ethnographic activity, and the cinematic experience as dialogue, Amoeba City is a glimpse into the inherently fragmentary, and fragile experience of a city--Tokyo. The project reexamines the Japanese metropolis and conceptions of urbanism in this particular time of crisis, ambivalence and rebuilding.

Experimental film works will animate the space and realign the parameters through which it is perceived, just as the cinematic visions of the artists presented offer a new way to read and encounter the city -- as archive (city of the past), as space of experience (present) and as grounds for potential (future). Structured around these three axes, and informed by an interdisciplinary approach to Japanese modernization and urbanization, referencing the Metabolist architectural movement, and Ozu’s Tokyo Monogatari, a dense texture of various voices, perspectives and expressions is portrayed. By way of multiple projections, integrating the classroom space to activate the fragmentary elements, the installation invites the viewer to move among the remembered, archived, and experienced cities.

All films courtesy of the filmmakers.

This is a benefit event with all donations going to Japan Society NY's Earthquake Relief Fund.

Amoeba City: SchoolNite: The New Museum's Festival of Ideas for the New City

Saturday, May 7th, 6pm – 4am & Sunday, May 8th, 12pm – 6pm,
at 233 Mott Street, NYC. corner of Mott and Prince. 3rd floor.

Works include:

Chris Marker's Tokyo Days (1988, video, sound, color, 20 min)
Tomonari Nishikawa's Yamanote Loop (2010, 16mm, sound, color, 15 min)
Shinkan Tamaki's One Record on December (2007, 16mm, silent, 6.5 min)

In The Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes, fascinated by Tokyo’s semiological density, wrote: “this city cannot be known except through some sort of ethnographic activity: you need to find your bearings [...] by walking its streets, by looking around you, through habit and experience: each discovery is both intense and fragile.”

Conceiving of filmmaking as ethnographic activity, and the cinematic experience as dialogue, Amoeba City is a glimpse into the inherently fragmentary, and fragile experience of a city--Tokyo. The project reexamines the Japanese metropolis and conceptions of urbanism in this particular time of crisis, ambivalence and rebuilding.

Experimental film works will animate the space and realign the parameters through which it is perceived, just as the cinematic visions of the artists presented offer a new way to read and encounter the city -- as archive (city of the past), as space of experience (present) and as grounds for potential (future). Structured around these three axes, and informed by an interdisciplinary approach to Japanese modernization and urbanization, referencing the Metabolist architectural movement, and Ozu’s Tokyo Monogatari, a dense texture of various voices, perspectives and expressions is portrayed. By way of multiple projections, integrating the classroom space to activate the fragmentary elements, the installation invites the viewer to move among the remembered, archived, and experienced cities.

All films courtesy of the filmmakers.

This is a benefit event with all donations going to Japan Society NY's Earthquake Relief Fund.