Maniacs of Disappearance

Today's Japan as Disseminator of Video-Messages

Taro Chiezo, Yuji Kitagawa, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Natsuku Otsuki, Mari Terashima, Noriko Umano, Yoshiniri Tsuda, Teiji Furuhashi, David Blair, David d'Heilly

3 July - 25 July 1997

Curated by Kazunao Abe, Yukiko Shikata, and Christophe Charles

A joint project with the Moving Image Centre, supported by the Japan Foundation

These videos by Japanese-born and Japanese-resident artists echo the country's consumer-driven culture, reflecting on the electronic image as all pervasive: consumed and consuming. In Japan, the illusionary spaces created by fantasy comics, computer games, and other technologies are big business, and Maniacs traffics in such simulations. Taro Cheizo's robots, programmed with human qualities such as sexual desire, manoeuver in an artificial garden. In a video by Mari Terashima, a teenager falls in love with a cyber-generated girl.