Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015’s Public Program began with the Access Program lectures and other events held in connection with Prelude [Exhibition] William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time, which was meant to increase accessibility to our prelude exhibition by reaching out and connecting with various fields that are not necessarily limited to contemporary art, ranging from film history, philosophy, physics, and more. Starting this April, the main focus will be placed on the artists participating in Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015. Access Program participants will be invited to take various approaches in getting to know the artists and their works, so that they will be prepared to enjoy the exhibition in 2015 on a deeper level.
Our first Access Program event to be held after the prelude exhibition was a study group on one of the artists who will participate in Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015, Yoshimasa Ishibashi. The initial plan was to see Ishibashi’s latest performance piece and join its related talk and workshop at the Kyoto Art Center, and to have a casual Q&A session with Ishibashi as participants look at materials related to his work. Instead of this casual Q&A session, Ishibashi gave the audience a pleasant surprise with a generous presentation of his work over the years.

Part 1 consisted of seeing MatchAtria by Yui Kawaguchi and Yoshimasa Ishibashi in the Auditorium at Kyoto Art Center. One of the nine sold-out performances, each limited to 20 seats, was reserved for this Access Program. MatchAtria premiered at Dock11 in Berlin in January 2014, and traveled to the Blueproject Foundation in Barcelona before its Asian premiere at Kyoto Art Center. This multidisciplinary performance is an extremely innovative collaboration where the delicate sounds heard through headphones, Ishibashi’s three-dimensional video projections, Yui Kawaguchi’s words and movements based on the “tactile score” methodology, and the “heartbeat peception unit” handed to each audience member directly by the performer all come together to stimulate the visual, tactile, and auditory senses. The scientific research and development that lies behind this complex piece was outlined in the talk and workshop held in the Japanese-style Hall at Kyoto Art Center. Ishibashi gave the audience some background about the project in general, and spoke in particular about how the 3D video projections took shape. Yasuhiro Suzuki (Associate Professor, Department of Complex Systems Science, Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University) explained the theory behind “tactile scores,” the method through which Kawaguchi’s words were translated into her physical movements in MatchAtria. Finally, Hideyuki Ando (Department of Bioinformatic Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology) discussed the research and development of the “heartbeat perception units” that are held in the audience’s hands during the performance to transmit Kawaguchi’s heartbeat as vibrations in real time. He also gave the audience a taste of the “Heartbeat Picnic” workshop, where heartbeats are “shared” as vibrations through these small units developed by Ando.

After the talk and workshop, the doors were opened at flowing KARASUMA for Part 2. Ishibashi began with further details behind the scenes of MatchAtria, and continuing with the subject of 3D video projections, he also gave detailed commentaries on atmesppai (2012) [see: www.kochi-bunkazaidan.or.jp/~museum/contents/hall/hall_event/hall_events2011/11kyupikyupi/hall_event11kyupi.eng.html] and VARIABLES (2011) [see: kyoto-ex.jp/2011archive-eng/program/soseiza], showing the audience making-of photos, diagrams, computer graphics, video clips and more to illustrate the process of creating these elaborate productions. He then declared that it is time to look back on the past, and showed clips from his famous television programs “Vermilion Pleasure Night” (2000) [see: www.vpn-tv.net/english; Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermilion_Pleasure_Night] and “Oh! Mikey” (2002–; also known as “The Fuccons”) [see: www.fuccon-family.com (in Japanese only); Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fuccons], and explained how they came to be. Finally, he discussed the exhibition SickeTel—KyupiKyupi and Ishibashi at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art in Kagawa (2010) [see: www.mimoca.org/en/exhibitions/2010/07/18/84] and his latest feature film Milocrorze: A Love Story (2011) [see: www.milocrorze.jp (in Japanese only)] before finishing off by announcing that he will be creating a new work for Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015. The Parasophia Office and the audience alike were sincerely moved by Ishibashi’s well-prepared and thorough artist talk, which surely must have taken an enormous amount of dedication and effort in the midst of preparing for and presenting the MatchAtria performances.

Part 1 of the evening was joined by 20 participants, and 61 audience members were present for Part 2. One student from Doshisha University provided assistance for Part 2 at flowing KARASUMA.

Access Program [Study Group] Yoshimasa Ishibashi
Date: Friday, April 18, 2014  6:00PM– (scheduled to end at 9:00PM)

Part 1
6:00–6:30 PM: MatchAtria performance, Auditorium, Kyoto Art Center (all seats reserved by Parasophia)
6:45–7:30 PM: MatchAtria talk and workshop, Auditorium, Kyoto Art Center

Part 2
8:00–9:00 PM: Study group on the works of Yoshimasa Ishibashi and Kyupi Kyupi with talk and Q&A by Ishibashi, flowing KARASUMA

Presented by the Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture Organizing Committee, Kyoto Association of Corporate Executives (Kyoto Keizai Doyukai), Kyoto Prefecture, and Kyoto City
With the cooperation of Hase Building Co., Ltd. and Ishibashi Production

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