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Shigeru Takato in Bratislava, November 2009 | ||||||||||||||||
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Artist-in-Residence program During his residency, photographer Shigeru Takato continued with his long-term project Television Studios, visiting stations in Budapest, Bratislava, Belgrade, Ljubljana and Zagreb. |
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| Ljubljana I, 2010 | |||||||||||||||||
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ARTISTS |
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See more of Shigeru Takato's Television Studios on www.origo.hu or visit his website at www.shigerutakato.de
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| Television Studios News discussion and stories in the television media portray our world. The media engages in an important role in shaping our perceptions of the world. A television studio is a place where an enormous amount of energy is concentrated. The human energy of heated discussion, debate, and breaking news are transformed and transmitted in and out of the studio in the form of electro-magnetic energy, which will eventually travel into space forever, as it tries to reach a wider audience. “Television Studios” is a photographic series of television studios in different cities around the world. The studio sets in the photographs are set up exactly as they are for broadcasting, including the lighting but without human presence. The photographs eliminate our expected familiarities from the television screen such as sound, human presence, and movements of TV-cameras. At the same time, the photographs expose un-familiarities such as lighting equipment, electric cables and taped markings on the floor in the studios. In other words, they empty the content and deconstruct the basic function of the media. With this work I try to address issues with credibility, influences and power of the Media and how we perceive the world through the media, which is reaching out to an ever fast growing audience in our technological time. Labyrinth of Buda (tentative title) work-in-progress A series of photographs of (apparently fake) artifacts, fossil records of modern products such as mobile phone and Coca-Cola bottle, etc., as well as cave paintings found in the labyrinth of Buda claimed to be originated from pre-historic time. It was my attempt to take them as historical record of high values rather than tourist attraction. (The people working there of course never admit that they are fake.) I tried to photograph them as important archaeological finds as they are presented. The artifacts were exposed under the sunlight for the first time (after so many millions of years) in the form of negative, leaving a positive image on paper. The technique “Cyanotype” was employed. It was invented in 1840, which was still in the early time of invention of photographic processes. Cyanotype process survived as a less costly way of reproduction till our modern age, well-known as blue prints used for architectural drawings and plans. What I am interested in here is the “originality” of things. Sure, the cave paintings are probably as old as the museum in the labyrinth but what and where are the original paintings? Even the “original” cave paintings are copies of what the painters saw in their time. Photographs themselves are indeed copies as we know them. Perhaps one might be able to say, original copy of the original, just like master copies of original negatives from Apollo missions in the NASA archive but what we see are the reproductions of the copies of the copies. Despite this we (or I at least) still try to see the essence of the originality in the copies. But is there such thing? Perhaps the originality shifts, lost or recreated in the process of copying, so perhaps the cave paintings in the labyrinth are no longer copies but in the position to claim as the original? Even the digital technique is act of copying in a way that all pre-set tools in computer programs let you copy and repeat over and over again. For a photograph to look photographic, it has to be copied from somewhere and pasted on a paper, be it analogue or digital. I copy and paste just like the old big copy machine that used to spit out the blue prints of architectural drawings of buildings (which are outside caves now), looking very hard to find the originality in the blue copies. I photographed about 20 different artifacts in the labyrinth in 6 different visits. Here I only present a few of them as trial. I will expose more of them once the sun comes back in summer in Germany. |
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| Budapest VIII, 2009 | |||||||||||||||||
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| Bratislava III, 2009 | |||||||||||||||||
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| In Labirinth of Buda he photographed tourist-trap dungeons under the Buda Castle to discover a futuristic archeological site. He completed this body of work using the archaic technique of cianotype. | |||||||||||||||||
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| Welcome dinner at Lumen Gallery | |||||||||||||||||
| Exposing a cianotype | |||||||||||||||||
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2010
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