Tokyo-lization, visual project at the 2016 Biennale

As part of the collateral event Time-Space-Existence at Palazzo Mora, at the 15th International Architecture exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Daigo Ishii and future-scape architects have presented a project that plays with layers of reality to create cityscapes in the special style of Tokyo. 
 


When you think of Tokyo things like advertising billboards, luminous neon banners, telephone poles, cherry blossom trees and colourful kiosks all come to mind. Images that shape our perception as much as our idea of the Japanese metropolis.


Buenos Aires


So what happens if these things that connote the identity of a specific city - Tokyo - are moved and applied in completely different settings? An experiment by Japanese Daigo Ishii and future-scape architects whose results are exhibited at Time-Space-Existence, collateral event of the 15th International Architecture exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. A “Reporting from the Front” where the collective image of a given location becomes the front of our perception. 


La Paz

Venezia

When you look at the photos and GIF proposed by Daigo Ishii and future-scape architects in “Tokyo-lization” you are faced with a mystifying experience, to say the least, because you see the figurative layers of Tokyo applied to cityscapes that are both geographically and culturally so much different from Japan. 





City views that are immediately identifiable in Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, La Paz and Venice become the backdrops for this visual experiment where coloured layers change what we see. This “Tokyo-lization” might be taken as a merely graphic - and therefore superficial - action because it is revealed in the actual image, but the fact is that it also shifts something inside you: your perception of a place is easily manipulated, which means that even just the act of looking needs attention so you can interpret the figurative and superfluous layers like a geologist studies each layer of the earth's sedimentation.

Christiane Bürklein

Project: Daigo Ishii and future-scape architects, http://www.future-scape.co.jp/
as part of the collateral exhibition Time-Space-Existence, from 28 May to 27 November 2016
Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy
Exhibition of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Images: courtesy of Daigo Ishii and future-scape architects
Related linksi: http://www.floornature.com/blog/biennale-of-venice-2016-exhibition---time-space-existence-11811/