VCT Videoart Compilation DVD "L'Empire des Signifiants"(2001)

from the country of high-tech and Manga. Current videoart has arrived with the concept of anti information/image. Emerging video artists in the Media Heaven, TOKYO, manipulate video to counter the information/image society. “L’Empire des Signifiants”(The Empire of Signing), which had been originally produced in 2001, is now reissued as a DVD.

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video composition #2 "Stolen Air" Kentaro Taki While watching TV, we usually do "zapping" without thinking seriously. This active behavior of changing the channels and getting information is as though collaging commercial images and sound from the TV programs.I sampled images and sounds at random from TV and composed many clips, and gave them new meanings.



"media cage" Kentaro Taki Today, mass media is powerful and absolute. This work shows two cages. One is the environment of media society and the other is the inner cage in our mind which protects us from huge various information in mass media society.



Study on Media "education before education" HATTORI Katsuyuki Preconditioning that so called mass-media is infiltrated into individuals in present Japanese society. This work takes a close look at the educational TV program in Japan, and reveals us an example of early preconditioning of human behavior. The video let us realize the environment of electric mass-media, and warns us that it is slowly taking away precious human functions since one's childhood.



"President" KANEMAKI Kazumi The fragments of time are cut into frames and restructured into mere information. Along with the objective image, the voice of narration on personal frustration makes the hope look impossible. "I want to be someone but I may not able to be someone." The endless paradox goes on...



"a not = a or For Devatas Who Keep on Dancing" KAWAI Masayuki This work criticizes the mass media and the totality where society controls the mass media by making images i.e. the society of spectacle. The video consists of some philosophical discourses and symbolic phenomena of the society of spectacle. Conservative young women in the spectacular city of Tokyo are superimposed on the beauties in a ruin, "Devatas" of Angkor Wat. The video denies the identical law "a =a" and to liberate peculiar moments from the general sense of time and space by using "Ma" (Japanese traditional sense of time and space).



ARTIST INTERVIEW HATTORI Katsuyuki
KANEMAKI Kazumi
KAWAI Masayuki
TAKI Kentaro
Compilation Overview