YAKUZA+HORROR+THEATER

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//YAKUZA HORROR THEATER// is a datamoshing multimedia piece that was created as a video interpretation of Yoshi Wada's 1974 performance piece/audio installation //Earth Horns With Electronic Drone//. In his installation, Wada created four "pipehorns" that he tuned to the frequency of the room itself, then layered an electronically produced drone piece on top of them. The end result was a 162-minute long auditory exploration of the room and its sonic properties; the four horns layer themselves in increasingly complicated drone sequences that rise and fall with each other in their shared examination of an ephemeral, elusive quality that the room possessed.

What I wanted to accomplish by creating a visual interpretation of //Earth Horns With Electronic Drone// was to create a means for art to produce itself, which I believe is the strongest and most important theme present in Wada's work. To achieve this, I edited clips together from the film //Gozu,// and used a video editing technique called datamoshing, which allows the movements recorded in the video to continue independently of the colors that they would normally contain – this creates the 'moving painting' effect that can be seen in the video. Datamoshing is not a precise editing technique, and more than anything gives the video something of a mind of its own; I thought that this was an suitable analog to Wada's engineering in //Earth Horns With Electronic Drone.//

//Click here to listen to a clip from Earth Horns With Electronic Drone//.

//YAKUZA HORROR THEATER// Spring 2011 Heather Palmer ARTS 235

A visual interpretation of Yoshi Wada's //Earth Horns With Electronic Drone, YAKUZA HORROR THEATER// is a datamoshing video piece that examines the relationship between separate video clips. In allowing the clips to literally play off of and on top of each other, it becomes something of a moving painting – echoing an aural drone interpretation of a space in Wada's piece.