Intermedia Japan (1955–1970)

As environmental and media ecologies changed drastically in 1960s urban Japan, how did artists respond to rapid growth and prosperity, and to their byproducts and side effects? In her C-MAP presentation, Miryam Sas revisits the “environments” and “apparatus” that were key to what, in the 1960s, came to be known as intermedia art, practiced by artists such as Matsumoto Toshio, Yuasa Joji, and Akiyama Kuniharu. Sas argues that these artists not only attempted to reflect the structures of mass media in the age of information, but also invented new forms and notions of media that directly engaged the sensibilities that spawned ever-taller buildings, deeper and more expansive underground passageways, and totalizing structures of high-growth capitalism. Recent disasters in Fukushima remind us once again of the fragility of the apparatuses and infrastructures of daily life that the intermedia artists grappled with.