What keeps giving us headaches with the daily RT is the categorization of events we list. There are of course events that clearly classify as "movie" or "dance performance", but an increasing number of "exhibitions with performance and talk session", "silent movies with live music accompaniment" or those multi-genre happenings featuring visuals, dance, DJs, live painting and food force us to spend hours pondering about where to list them. Not that it’s really necessary to categorize events in general, but as a matter of fact we simply have to when inputting information in the RT event database (=making the the so-called "event cards"). That’s how our system works, and we can't do anything about it. So in the end we usually just drop them where it seems best…
One such event was "Dorkbot Tokyo", that was held on 5/12 at Super Deluxe. It was Senbo Kensuke from the artists' unit exonemo who informed me about the event first in an email describing Dorkbot (dorkbot.org) as "a meeting/event with a theme as simple as 'people doing strange things with electricity', held by a community that encompasses over 20 major cities around the world." I suppose not many of you have a very clear picture after reading this.
During my stay in Berlin during the transmediale last February, I actually missed a "Dorkbot" show that was on the program as a related event there. After spending my time checking out a number of other events, I arrived at the Dorkbot venue when the spectacle had just closed.All I got was a taste of tension that was still in the air, and the same taste I got again at Super Deluxe.
The atmosphere was there right from the beginning, so it wasn't some kind of elation. I'd rather make something like the participants' body scent responsible for the tension, the peculiar "exhaustions" of "people doing strange things with electricity". It’s a kind of smell that seems to be dwelling since ages in, say, the basements of massive old buildings in Berlin’s Mitte or Kreuzberg districts, or, in Tokyo, multi-tenant building in Akihabara or along the Chuo Line.
So let me try and pin down more or less concretely what actually happened at Dorkbot Tokyo. The event started off with a presentation by Biopresence, the unit of Fukuhara Shiho and Georg Tremmel, who explained the process of building "Living Memorials" by storing human DNA, which was encoded using a special technique, in the genes of trees. To the man on the street the technical aspects are incomprehensible, and ethical issues that seem to be of great public concern don't apply. However, it’s clear that this is a groundbreaking effort, and the demonstration (experimentation?) on beans (or what was that again?) extracting their DNA without the help of sequencers (=manually) shown later wasn't any less sensational. The "DNA Cocktail" served in test tubes was received less favorably though…
Next was a presentation by "Tocho Denki Daigaku/Onshitsu Kojo Iinkai". Hidden behind these monikers are two writers who regularly contribute to "Radio Life", an old-established magazine that featured in the past such semi-criminal articles as "Why pay NHK reception fees?", "Taping videos from Planet Erotica with a home computer", "All fraud tricks for net auctioneers", "How to receive military airband", or "25 years of police radio tricks". The duo’s demonstrations of "moving sex dolls" and "what a 100,000 yen worth of batteries can set in motion" were educational and ambitious. I for one had a good laugh. Also part of their show was a slightly life-threatening DJ set using human bodies as conductors and switches.
What was even more fun was a … err, well, let’s call it a "quiz" for now… So, there was a quiz with "Oto ga Bando-mei" ("the sound is the band’s name"), two incredibly untalented rappers of whose rap nobody could understand a word, and who even stopped in the middle of their set. This overwhelmingly poor performance with a threefold handicap made the audience burst with laughter. The "quiz" part was about guessing songs from intro melodies the duo pulled from the motherboard of a basic home computer, and the fact that this was enough to amuse people shows that these guys are just brilliant.
Next came a lecture (?) on experimental thought (?) by renowned media artist Fujihata Masaki. His aim was reportedly to convey the fun of creating Ouroboros- or Moebius strip-like chains of numbers based on the "Solitaire" computer game, but unfortunately all numbers got erazed everytime Fujihata interrupted the game for explanation. Too bad, Fujihata-san, really!
The event closed with an "Optron" solo by Ito Atsuhiro. As always, he was awesome. (See also volume 108 "Do Not Kill Expo" of this column for more about the Optron.)
To sum it up, it was as loose as an event concept could get, and therefore virtually impossible to fit in any category. Sure Fujihata found a good expression when he called it "the underground of the times", but "underground" isn't really a category… Well anyway, I simply hope to experience this loose, inexplicable kind of amusement again, and would definitely vote for making Dorkbot a regular on Tokyo’s event calendar.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO