Tatsou Miyaijima
La Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
261, blvd. Raspail
14e Paris

With regard to the cultural shaping of technology, sociologists and
anthropologists state that social and technological change come together
as a packet: if we want to understand either, we must understand both.
In this respect, Tatsou Miyaijima's work with "time" is beneficial to
the understanding of the new relationship of what we think of as "time"
to the society of the global digital empire.

The Japanese artist Tatsou Miyaijima has made two large installations at
the Cartier Foundation and a performance; all which deal with the
abstract "nature" of time in the digital age. The installations consist
of multiple LED signal lights which flash digital numbers in great
quantities in what appears to be random order within a dark large room.
One installation has the numbers circulating on the floor in chaotic
patterns ("Running Time 1993") moved by small car toys. The other ("Time
Go Round") has 20 green and red digital modules spinning in various
circular orbits against a large, again darkened, wall. What one
perceives is a constellation of revolving red and green numbers. It was
very beautiful to see.

If Tatsou Miyaijima's work is an attempt to outline a crisis of time and
of the self in lieu of the information age where abstract personal
identity and interactions outside of clock-time have become
non-problematic in postindustrial settings, then his art might serve to
encourage us to value the freedom and flourishing of the individual's
interior sense of time and pressure and stress and aging.

The questions posed by Tatsou Miyaijima's work then are: "What am I
doing this for?" and, "Do I have time to exist for myself?"

The night of the opening there was a very simple performance piece by
Tatsou Miyaijima where he instructed 6 people to count down from nine to
zero in French where zero became a silent count at which point the
performers plunged their heads into bowls of water from the Mururoa in
the South Pacific where the nuclear explosions took place (testing
French nuclear weapons). Paradoxically, this basic need of freedom from
time, which Tatsou Miyaijima posed in this performance and in the two
installations, might serve as a prime motivator for an individual's
entering the virtual time dimension of the online. But perhaps as the
plunging of the performers head into water illustrates, in fact most
people's daily life has never been more over-regulated by time
constraints and the demands made upon them as life becomes increasingly
organized around the impersonal administration of people at every level.

But in Miyaijima's oriental sense of art/time, time always carries the
intertwined dimensions of the symbolic and the functional, the symbolic
including the cultural, ritual and religious dimensions. Therein lies
the potential of long-term societal change through art/time which will
undoubtedly have untold spiritual implications in an age where every
user may become a server to all other users. Art may mean
etymologically: to bring together, to put together, to share our time!
In a virtual art community this has the implication of responsibility
and respect. Being online means being together without an agenda and it
serves a need to break the contradictions of the real world with ideals
of freedom from time and rules and constraints.