This installation explores the rich cultural history of Japan through the concept of “a river in time”. It is a six screen and multichannel audiovisual work that has been created by leading UK media artists The Light Surgeons, featuring new music by Japanese percussionist and composer Midori Takada. Re-contextualising a set of newly restored films from the BFI’s Japan on Film archive, the work re-traces the themes and locations in these early cinematic views of Japan with new material gathered by the artists across the country in 2020.
Tokinokawa
The Light Surgeons
Artists & Engineers' Arron Smith created a pipeline for automatically analysing the footage using Yolo and other Machine Learning models and rendering the custom animated overlays as layers for the team to use in the final composition.
This film footage from the past and present is analysed in order to transport us into the near future. It is a future where archives are continually examined and mined by semi-autonomous programs that participate in an endless form of data archaeology. This memory retrieval and its “artificial gaze” is presented by an animated infographic layer in the work created using bespoke AI software tools.
Artists & Engineers' Arron Smith created a pipeline for automatically analysing the footage using Yolo and other Machine Learning models and rendering the custom animated overlays as layers for the team to use in the final composition.
