Trip

Summary

音楽　大野 泰夫

　The Generation of Subconscious Visual Sensation TRIP is a pivotal work in Naoko Tosa’s early video art that defined the relationship between the rhythm of video editing and physical sensation. The concept of the work was to produce “impactful images that burn into the brain as afterimages in the subconscious,” aiming to relax the tensions of daily life. Tosa herself has noted that it was through this work that she first grasped her unique rhythm of video editing. The crucial point here is that TRIP is not a narrative video. In this piece, forms and colors undergo metamorphosis, and the phantasmagoric images carry an intense sense of urgency. Rather than explaining a meaning, the video acts directly upon the spectator’s perception and nerves. In other words, TRIP treats the moving image not as an “object to be seen,” but as a force capable of altering states of consciousness. From an art historical perspective, TRIP represents the point at which Japanese video art in the 1980s moved away from documentation and storytelling. Instead, it began to intervene in the spectator’s physical sensations through the inherent rhythm, color, transformation, and velocity of the medium itself. The work received significant acclaim both domestically and internationally, appearing in exhibitions such as “SCAN ’85 Autumn” at Video Gallery SCAN Tokyo and the 2nd International Biennale Video CD ’85. It went on to win an award in the SIGGRAPH ’86 Animation Screening category, a Special Prize at the Japan Video Festival, and 2nd Place in the Video Art category at the 1987 American Film & Video Festival. To put it most sharply for Akira Tatehata: TRIP is not a work that expresses something through video. It is a work that creates the conditions for a sensation to be generated within the spectator through the rhythm of the medium. If the later Sound of Ikebana uses sound to move fluids and give rise to fleeting forms invisible to the naked eye, then TRIP serves as its precursor by using editing, color, and transformation to trigger afterimages, tension, and subsequent release within the spectator’s consciousness. What is generated in TRIP is not a natural phenomenon, but the visual sensation itself that lingers in the subconscious. In this sense, TRIP is one of the starting points for “emergence” in Tosa’s early oeuvre. It is a work that liberated video from information and narrative, utilizing it instead as a device for the generation of sensation.

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