Tokyo’s first impressions

While I was still at the academy in Rotterdam, around the time I created the installation for the boompjes I described earlier, I was contacted by one of my student colleagues about an exchange project with Tokyo. There was an artist, who’s name has gotten lost in the years, that was offering to ‘do some things for others’ during his stay in Tokyo. The idea of Virtual Journeys was already forming in my mind and after we spoke about a few options I gave him 4 rolls of Fuji-film 36 exposures to shoot images at the Shibuya Station. This gave me Tokyo’s first impressions.

Why Shibuya Station Captured My Imagination

This location was my choice. Shibuya station spoke to my imagination because of the well know pedestrian crossing that goes across the intersection. The video images I saw were of hundreds of people simultaneously crossing the streets. For me this was an impressive view and I wanted to do something with that fact. Later I learned that almost 3 million people pass there every day, commuting between home and their workplaces. Tokyo, in my mind, was like no city I have ever seen myself, and that was after having been to London, Paris and New-York.

Collages in PageMaker: Reconstructing Shibuya Square

When he returned I had the photo’s developed and put onto Kodak Photo CD, a format that no longer exists. Digital photography was not a thing yet in the nineties. I had not yet formed any plas on what to do with the images until I started to put them into PageMaker, creating collages telling the story of Shibuya Station and square. Looking at the images and studying what was happening there from image-to-image gave me the feeling that I was briefly on that square. I tried to emphasise this feeling in the way I cut up the images and represented them.