Kentaro Yamada

Noisy World

Colours from 7 Airports

Sound was recorded at airports in Auckland, Melbourne, Paris, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Shanghai.
Amplitude and frequency of the sounds were then sampled and mapped to 1024 lines in RGB value between 0 and 16777215. (0x000000 - 0xffffff) These unique values are represented on the circle as 1024 strips of colours.
You can listen to the recordings from the airports by playing the CD on the CD player.

Waterflow

The idea of a jet-boat which ejects water for propulsion was invented by Sir William Hamilton in New Zealand in 1954. Many of the commercial boats including ferries in Auckland use this technology now.
Being a sailor from a young age, I grew up looking at waves and riding them. A wave is something that is tangible for a split second, but always changing and disappearing. Kind of like putting a hand out of the car perhaps.
Here I took a video of waves at the back of the Fullers ferry. A computer program then processed the video. Each frame in the video is manipulated in that every pixel is shown randomly from any 10 frames before or after this frame. This still shows a single frame after the pixel manipulation process.
In 'real' time there is a constant game of failure between your eyes and brain to see the wave at that instant. Here the computer program gets in on the game, shifting cinematic time and compiling the instant from multiple points.

'Real'

Artworks operate best when they have a relationship with real life. For me this relationship involves a poetic experience of the closeness between realness and fakeness, between meaning and a lack of meaning.
In 1906 Kazuo Okakura wrote in the Book of Tea "It [Tea Ceremony] is essentially a worship of the imperfect as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life."
In Japanese there is a term Bimyo, meaning being ambiguous but making sense. A Japanese Potter, Kakiemon the Fourteenth (the Kiln has been passed down for 14 generations), says in his book "Perhaps we Japanese tend to prefer things to be ambiguous and subtle (Bimyo), perhaps some kind of contradiction or irony. The same goes for ceramics. Maybe I can call it a noise? We don't feel quite right without this noise or imperfection in our ceramics. How to tell a good noise and bad noise - this is very ambiguous (Bimyo). When you see it first, it is very hard to tell there is anything in it, but when you look at good noise, really closely, you can feel it, feel the sense of beauty."

- Kentaro Yamada and Martyn Reynolds