“Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species”

William Gibson, from Thursdays edition of the International Herald Tribune. September 2nd, 2010. The same day as my brothers birthday – happy birthday Lox.

Photo of an oversized egg i made in 2008.

I hate seasonal gradients. When does summer really end? Autumn is not so bad, but i wish the seasons were more discrete. Then the slow realisation that you can’t swim in the ocean anymore wouldn’t burn so long.

I once gave blood to a geriatric nurse. The needle slowly – very slowly, still going, still going inside your skin, deep needle, slowly stinging – going into your arm. And then the tourniquet is removed and the blood slowly leaves your body; creeping, evacuating the veins of your arm, your heart pumping slower, forcing out the liquid, feeling it leave, a dull pain, the click of each plastic canister as they are filled up.

As well as despising seasonal gradients, i am also against bodily liquid extraction gradients. I think gradients are inherent to torture. Without having gradual pain applied consistently torture does not exist. Gradient is over (if you want it). Act discretely.

Photo from yesterday, “last” beach trip of the summer organized by Mr. Oliver Watson (HERE). Mark Drew also took great photos, please check his flickr HERE for a more realistic vision of the day. Above, Oliver is walking to jump from a rock into the sea. That is a relatively discrete action, a excellent choice of direct action against gradients in my opinion. Last time Oliver jumped off this rock the spine from a sea urchin went deep inside his foot. It went in very quick but took a long time to get the spine back out. A young Japanese couple in wetsuits came to help. Later they would put on snorkels, take spear fishing guns, swim far out, shoot a large fish, come back, gut the fish, make a fire and eat it during a nice sunset. Although i have never eaten fish before, i was incredibly jealous of their actions.

Last part of the series on traditional handmade paper from Mino went up on Papersky’s International Edition (HERE). In the above photo Hoki Naritoshi is showing us Mino’s first plantation of Kozo (Mulberry) trees. The bark is used to make Japanese Washi. Mino has traditionally sourced it’s Kozo bark from Ibaraki, but this plantation marks a localization of paper making. Mino didn’t even grow it’s own Kozo tree’s when the town started making paper about 1300 years ago. I feel like this is a good example of the “long tail” (HERE) – a theory of change which seems to have an increasing efficacy in explaining consumer behavior, e.g. consumable phenomena like ‘music’ go from being large monolithic ‘things’ – with a few huge artists consumed by most of the population – to conglomerates of millions of tiny ‘things’ – where itunes and blogs offer endless artists consumed by endless niche groups. Perhaps even Mino’s tradition of paper making is an example of these ideas – rather than each city honing in on one element of a tradition (the tree’s, the tools, the paper itself), it seems Mino is an example of ‘total tradition’, where one town, one suburb or even one person, is required to be skilled in all areas of a tradition. This seems to go against the idea of the craftsman or “shokunin,” who spend their lives endlessly perfecting one discrete action or item, not growing tree’s to make their own tools or raising sheep to make their own garments, but repeating movements to achieve something good, something approaching perfection.

There is an art festival on seven of the islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, The Setouichi Festival (HERE). I recently spent three days there as a photographer on a frantic press trip with Vicente Guttierrez, a writer from Tokyo and the editor of Papersky’s International Edition (HERE).

The islands are little versions of Japan within Japan. Discrete microcosms of one possible future the nation as a whole may be approaching – a future generated by a long term economic downtown and a declining, aging population. One island, Inujima, now has only 50 residents, down from 3000 a half century ago. Inujima also has no convenience store, perhaps the most symbolic sign of decline and decay in Japan. Vicente accurately dubbed the islands “haikyo (ruins) in progress.” Abandoned buildings, homes, stores, and temples dot the islands, often completely overgrown by vines and weeds. The Haikyo appear so randomly it feels as though the island as a whole might one day be suddenly consumed by nature and disappear under a matted blanket of green stuff.

To combat the decline an art festival has been created to attract visitors and to reposition the islands – semantically, symbolically, semiotically – as valuable artful destinations. Curator Fram Kitagawa is responsible for this repositioning. This festival is his latest attempt to revive living folk culture with contemporary art. It’s hard to measure his success, but we tried. We spent the three days looking at some of the widely dispersed art (James Turrell’s arthouse, and the endless SANAA structures were good), but mostly we spent the time talking to locals; a lemon farmer on Teshima, young employee’s of the festival, a monk and workman on Ogijima, and the owner of a hotel on Naoshima. Mostly they were oblivious to the art permeating their islands. It seemed the larger the island the less the locals cared. It was immensely interesting to see the relationship between art made to help local people and how those local people viewed the art itself. Complete write up and photos should be up on Papersky International Blog soon.

Blue photo taken from the top of Ogijima.

Part II of my piece on Japanese hand made paper went up on Papersky International Blog (HERE). This one is about Shouji Kazunari who crafts one of the key tools required for making washi – the ‘Keta’. Kazunari is one of only three remaining Keta makers in Japan, and he has no successor. His situation raises important questions about government funding for aging ‘Shokunin’ (craftsmen, kind of – read HERE for a good article). Kazunari does not have the financial security to support himself, his family and an apprentice.

In New Zealand and Australia there a significant amount of funding for the arts (for research trips, gallery shows, publications, recordings, theatre shows etc. etc. etc.), via government bodies such as ‘Creative NZ’ and the ‘Australia Council’, but there are no real equivalent bodies in Japan. Shokunin culture is disappearing, not adapting. Increased funding is essential as it would help traditional crafts merge more naturally with the contemporary world. Without a natural evolution from generation to generation these traditional crafts risk becoming reduced to clichéd simplifications of themselves. In that possible future the rich knowledge and history embedded into the hands and tools of Shokunin would be flattened into linear entries on Wikipedia and crass re-enactments for tourists. A folk dystopia.

Photos of Kazunari’s medium (wood propped up against a window) and his byproduct (a barrel of wood shavings).

Without knowing exactly how to get there, we walked towards the source of the Tamagawa. The river flows out into Tokyo Bay, very close to Haneda airport, so this was where we began. Planes were leaving for Seoul, Singapore, Okinawa. Places you can’t walk to.

We walked for 40 kilometers over two days and it was strange and grueling. The Tamagawa runs for almost 140km, a quarter of which is through built up residential and urban areas of Tokyo. We wanted to walk out of the city by foot, rejecting trains and cars. The paths begin wide; made from concrete, flanked by long stretches of playing fields, overgrown bush, gated homeless communities. Since it was a sunday the paths and fields were filled with people – cyclists covered in full body lycra and sweat, homeless men using remote controlled helicopters, women playing lacrosse. One moment is especially clear: late afternoon, long shadows under bridges, overgrown concrete terrace on the left with a saxaphonist playing jazz standards, many lazy walkers and bike riders; odd constellations of people (four identical baseball players on shopping bikes). Behind us were two railway bridges, at that moment one supported a commuter train, and behind it a Shinkansen traveling in the opposite direction. An overly tanned topless man in a nearby playing field began to stretch and shake – a bad dance. Perhaps, enraged by the heat and confusion, someone might start shouting, or stab a strolling passerby.

The next day we woke at 5am and were covered in sweat by 7am (over 100 people would die in Japan from the heat on this same day). Around 11am we reached the end of the concrete path. Sweat ran down our foreheads and our eyes burned from the salty water. Constant wiping. Useless. At the end of the path we thrashed through bush. Cut elbows and forearms. Five foot high grass. Ten foot high grass. Disappearing path. Then Mark saw the snake and i jumped into the river. Photo above of myself in the river, after walking up it for an hour or so, asking locals about how far above my head the water would be if i wanted to cross to the other side. Photo taken by Mark Drew, and you can see the rest of his photos HERE. Mark moved to Tokyo earlier this year from Sydney where he was a co-founder of the China Heights gallery.

The first part of a three part series on handmade paper from Mino just went up on PAPERSKY (HERE) and SNOW (HERE). The first is on Masashi Sawamura, pictured above in his trophy room surrounded by towers of handmade paper. We sat on the tatami as he told us stories and showed his prizes and awards (he was given the highest award a living person can acquire for cultural achievement in japan – one rank above a ‘national intangible living treasure’). In the center of our circle was a spot where the tatami had completely worn through. The fibers had completely disappeared in an area about the size of a man’s hand, marking out a messy zone where he had shared more tea, paper, and treasures than the tatami could physically withstand.