When trying to forecast developments in technology, I'm mostly wrong. Or better, I'm always wrong. Nonetheless, every time a technological innovation is introduced, it usually takes just a short while of confusion and bewilderment until I realize that I have fully integrated that technology into my daily life.
Along with the dawning of the 1980s, as a young high school student I began to make music using a cheap Yamaha synthesizer that could only play single notes, and a multi-track tape recorder. In those days, the most marvelous development in music-related technology was for me a synthesizer with lots of knobs, that could play harmonies, and create and store composite sounds - something like the Prophet 5, which YMO were using at the time. The CD was yet to be invented.
I had no way of knowing that I would be using a sequencer to make (program) music made up of analogue sound sources digitalized with sampling machines, and edited in millisecond units, only a few years later. Even more than that, the appearance of a communication tool called Internet that would revolutionize the music world, and actually just about the whole planet, was beyond my wildest dreams.
August 5-7
Together with a writer I embark on a 5-hour airplane and railway trip to a certain painter’s atelier at the edge of a valley in a rural town. Under the blazing sun, the spacious atelier has heated up to about 48 degrees centigrade room temperature. In that environment I witness for the first time in my life the birth of an artwork from the start right to its completion. Only about 30 seconds after the artist’s hands began to move, there is already something on the canvas that makes me aware that I am looking at what will become this specific painter’s creation. Just another three minutes later, however, there are so many pieces of paper and other assorted materials pasted on top of the paint that absolutely nothing is left of those initial traces, and the artwork has transformed into something completely different. From there, the canvas keeps changing constantly, and shows different sceneries every three minutes, until the artist’s hands suddenly stop moving. His work is done. Hidden under the surface are several dozen, or probably several hundred other paintings, each of which is enticing in its own right. The painter himself, the novelist, and myself were the only three people who saw these countless "artworks", which don't exist anymore. I wonder what the writer is thinking about this form of "creation", and how he will use his imagination to put that into words for a future issue of "Shincho"…
August 8-10
Back in Tokyo, the work that has piled up while I was away keeps me busy until early in the morning. Later I board a train and then a taxi that takes me - after a journey of about six hours - to a place in the provincial city where I meet my colleague again. We spend the short time we have left until we have to get to work driving around. The car winds its way through the mountains, until finally, after a long curve, we see in the distance a waterfall gushing down the mountainside. We park the car and walk about ten minutes, and the waterfall seen at close range is definitely one of the most impressive and incredible "works" I've ever seen. It appears to me that this geological formation that is little more than just a scratch on the earth’s surface easily knocks out 99 percent of all contemporary art.
August 11
After returning home to Tokyo, I switch on my computer for the first time in a while. As a high school student, I had no clue that people were going to use a flat, A4-sized "laptop" computer to compose, perform, record, play and distribute music two decades later. What I also didn't know was that I was not going to make music anymore in the 21st century, even though I was going to own all those "marvels of technology". On this day, I try for the first time the new Google service called "Street View", and at this point I have no way of knowing that I will soon be confused and bewildered by seeing "street view" footage of Clair the cat hanging around by the window…