A Million Keys

Toshio Matsumoto


White Hole, 1979 (Still)

I just discovered the work of Toshio Matsumoto today via Chris Coy’s delicious. The videos are accompanied by an interesting interview with Matsumoto. See below for a short excerpt:

I’ve shifted my focus to experiments in context, experiments in deconstructing the contextual system through which people give meaning to or interpret the world. When people create an image of the world inside themselves, they do that through a story. They always narrativize the world. Perception is shaped in the form “X is Y,” and that descriptive form is, in the end, a narrative. That won’t change as along as human beings have language. But the problem is that this way of forming a context is conventionalized and easily confines the relationship between one’s self and the world to a stable law of perspective. For instance, when people are given more than one item of information, they associatively create a story out of the relationships between those items. There’s a part of a game show where they show an image bit by bit and you have to guess what it is, like a picture of Tokyo Tower or the L’Arc de Triomphe. In that case, people try to compare and interpret that partial information with narratives that they know. That method gets stuck in a mold and knowledge only begins to flow through inert conduits.

We have to do more to irritate and disturb modes of perception, thinking, or feeling that have become automatized in this way. I did several kinds of experiments from the 1970s to the 1980s that de-automatized the visual field. But when image technology progresses such that you can make any kind of image, people become visually used to that. That’s why there’s not much left today with a fresh impact. In this way, the problem is that the interpretive structure of narrating, giving meaning to, or interpreting the world has become so thoroughly systematized that one cannot conceive of anything else that is largely untouched. We have to de-systematize that.


Phantom, 1975


Ki Or Breathing, 1980


Enigma, 1978