It all began when someone said to me: “Could you do something interesting in a newly constructed recycling plant?”

After hearing about the plant’s design plan and visiting its construction site, we concluded that we should host an art exhibition there. The plant is unique in that it is situated on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay, directly across from Haneda Airport. We aimed at making this landscape—along with the soundscape formed by airplanes flying back and forth overhead—an intense physical and social environment that interacts with artists’ works to resonate in various ways. Assuming such an environment, the only thing SETENV would tell the artists was that we wanted their works to be conscious of this place.
This recycling plant will mainly process metals reclaimed from electronic devices. The artists toured an existing recycling factory that was already in operation, visited the new plant’s construction site, and prepared their works while continuing such interactions. While a simple approach, such chance encounters between artists and a recycling plant formed the core of this project.

Yasunao Tone, who relocated to the United States in 1972, has had a great influence on Japanese avant-garde art through his band Group Ongaku and other projects. When music started to be released on compact discs in the 1990s, he realized some amazing results in the areas of sound art and post-techno digital music. For this exhibition, he created a sound installation that takes in ambient environmental sounds, factory work sounds, etc., and modifies them according to audience movements as detected by sensors. The resulting sounds are never the same, with visitors unwittingly taking part in a recycling process for “noise.”

Turntable pioneer Christian Marclay has garnered international attention for his installations incorporating records, musical instruments, musical scores, and sound. His submitted work featured out-of-service cellphones, desktop computers, and laptops, all showing on their screens the process by which they are disassembled and sorted. An important aspect of this presentation is that the sounds arising from the recycling process are so unlike those they make during normal operations. The genius of this work lies in that these devices seem to be relating their own unconsciousness and dreams.
Kazuya Kondo exhibited a video installation, taking as its theme Kobo Abe’s last workroom and an unfinished novel discovered on a floppy disk. This work, which has been evolving since 2002, incorporates features of the venue to create a shelter-like space, for which the video was updated. Here, reality and images reflecting that reality forever echo back and forth, like two mirrors facing each other.

Pol Malo spent a month creating an installation from large amounts of polystyrene foam scrap resulting from construction of the plant. This softly colored polystyrene forms something like a forest, from which faint aromas drift, creating a space that is simultaneously nostalgic and novel. It takes as its theme “recycling our brain,” addressing issues of recollection.

Kei Hirakura examines the dismantling process that will occur in the plant, demonstrating a state of uncertainty that he has named a “quasi-part.” Items undergoing dismantling, he finds, are vague in that they are neither “forms” with meaning, nor “materials” with their meaning completely erased. On three screens, he shows the images of the generative process for these quasi-parts, along with text attempting to describe them.

710.beppo, a unit formed by artists vokoi and Ken Furudate, use a computer to control an industrial vibrator attached to a steel plate. This work presents “music” as manipulation of vibrations in an object along a temporal axis. Visitors stand atop this “instrument,” allowing them to directly feel it. One source for this idea was vibrations from the metal crushers used in recycling plants.

Other related events were held alongside these exhibitions. “Tabula Rasa,” a conceptual performance at the plant by Marclay and Flo Kaufmann, employed turntables and record cutters to demonstrate recycling of self-generated sound. A concert held at UNIT in Tokyo’s Daikanyama district presented a Japan-first duo of Yasunao Tone and Hecker, along with the first joint performance by Marclay and Sachiko M.

“Environment” and “recycling” are generally spoken of in social, political, or economic contexts. So is it possible for art to intervene at the forefront to reinterpret and communicate these themes? This is what “Variations on a Silence: Project for a Recycling Plant” attempts to do, presenting questions that remain open to us.

Takuya Irie and Ryo Inoue (SETENV)
*Note: The above is based on an article appearing in Idea No. 311 (Seibundo Shinkosha, July 2005).