14th Art Division Critiques

Questioning the massive amount of accumulated ”time”

What I felt in participating in this screening was the sense of "time." It may be similar to the confusion felt when standing silently in front of several hundred different sized cans. Humans are given a limited amount of time to live. We are like strings of set lengths. Today, in the information space, works are proliferating by massive numbers, creating massive accumulations at a speed that conflicts with our individually allotted amounts of time. Hundreds of thousands of songs and thousands of images. Thinking about the length of one's string, which has far surpassed one's tangible limits, leaves us with a sense of emptiness. In the case of still images, rationality that leads moving expression and massive amounts of information to instantaneous understanding serves to support the quality of expression. How should the concept of time be recognized in works that require "time?" The shortsighted problem of needing to simply shorten the amount of time is obvious, but what sensations should be made to work there? This is the question that has been generated.

Profile
HARA Kenya
Graphic Designer
Born in Okayama Prefecture in 1958, HARA is a professor at Musashino Art University and representative of the Nippon Design Center. He is concerned with designing "circumstances" as much as "things." Since 2002 he has been a member of the Advisory Board of MUJI, where he is in charge of art direction. Through exhibitions and other projects designed from an original perspective, including RE-DESIGN and HAPTIC, he explores design possibilities latent in the everyday and in human sense perceptions. Recent works include commercial product designs for companies such as AGF, JT and KENZO, the Matsuya Ginza renewal project, Mori Building VI, and design direction for the Daikanyama Tsutaya Book Store. His books include Design no Design (Design of Design, Iwanami Shoten, 2003), and Nihon no Design (Design of Japan, Iwanami Shoten, 2011).