I made this video for the song “2020” by the Boston band LOVELY during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, utilizing and/or manipulating what is (to the best of my knowledge) public domain and open source footage. My thanks to the generous Mike “Beeple-Crap” Winkelmann for the use of two open source clips.
LOVELY: Jim Keough – Voice / Rick Jones – Bass / Craig Adams – Guitar / Jack Clark – Battery / Paul Delano – Guitar
After reading Ōyama Shirō’s memoir, A Man With No Talents (San’ya gakeppuchi nikki), I became interested in this Tokyo district for day laborers, now popular among foreign visitors for its budget accommodations. In Blair McBride’s Digital Journal piece “Mysterious Past Meets Uncertain Future in Tokyo’s Sanya District” I discovered the area’s dark history as a ghetto for the “Burakumin” underclass, as well as an Edo Period execution grounds. Considering that the Japanese government virtually erased all references to Sanya on area maps during the 1960’s, I decided to look up the area on a 10,000:1 scale map of Tokyo, using the Google Translate application on my phone to superimpose translations on the camera’s live image. The application produced strange results, trying to decipher not only the kanji characters and their context to one another, but individual radicals, or kanji elements within a greater kanji. In the above video, words pop on and off of the screen at a dizzying pace, resulting in a stream of “pseudo-consciousness.” Glimpses of hidden truth, or just surreal fun?