January Members’ Viewing: Ko Nakajima’s Animaker & Aniputer
From George Lessard, The Digital Manipulations of the Aniputer, 1985, 21 min, video
This December and January, as part of our Community of Images programming, CCJ are thrilled to present a two-month focus on the image-processing experiments of Ko Nakajima, particularly in relation to his time in the United States and Canada.
In January, we will focus on the life of Nakajima’s two commercial image-processing inventions, the Animaker, developed with Sony in 1979, and the Aniputer, developed with JVC in 1982, and the subsequent life of the devices among video artists in Canada. The works offer a look into the operation and distribution of early personal image-processing technology in the 1980s, used for producing animations, graphics and more.
The program will feature a demo reel of the Animaker produced by Michael Goldberg, identified in CCJ’s 2018 collection survey and presented in collaboration with Keio University Art Center. It will also feature The Digital Manipulations of the Aniputer, a 1985 demonstration video of the Aniputer by Canadian video artist George Lessard, who played a significant role in raising awareness of the Aniputer, winning an award at the 10th Tokyo Video Festival (sponsored by JVC) for one of his works using the device. The third work in the program is Miguel Raymond’s “video opera” OUT (1986), made using the Aniputer in collaboration with composer Alain Thibault. Encountering the Aniputer in Montreal, Raymond studied with Nakajima in Tokyo at the Graphic Institute of Technology in the summer of 1984.
This program is in part made possible by Keio University Art Center and its project, Support Program to Promote Archives of Media Arts 2023: Digitizing and Cataloging of Performance and Exhibition Video Records from the post-1970s.
Our Community of Images programming is also generously supported by Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ Preserving Diverse Cultures grant.
We also thank scholar Nina Horisaki-Christens for her advice and consultation on the program.
PROGRAM
Ko Nakajima & Michael Goldberg, Animaker Sony Demo Reel (NAK 1524), 15 min, video
George Lessard, The Digital Manipulations of the Aniputer, 1985, 21 min, video
Miguel Raymond & Alain Thibaut, Extract from OUT, 1986, 4 min, video
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the programs will be available for viewing on cCJ’s viewing platform.
program
Ko Nakajima & Michael Goldberg, Animaker Sony Demo Reel (NAK 1524), 15 min, video
“Until now, using half-inch consumer video, frame-by-frame animation has not been possible. Using the Animaker, it’s now a reality.” This is a demo of the Animaker, Nakajima’s 1979 time-lapse animation device made in collaboration with Sony. The film highlights the unique features and capabilities of the Animaker, tested on subjects including human bodies, natural phenomena such as clouds and melting snow, traffic, clay models, and a train journey across the US. It features footage taken by Nakajima at the Western Front Gallery in Vancouver.
George Lessard, The Digital Manipulations of the Aniputer, 1985, 21 min, video
Touring Canada and the US demonstrating the Aniputer, this instructional video from George Lessard guides the viewer step-by-step through its functions. Lessard demos creating synthesized text and graphics, modulated footage from television and dance performances, and abstract animations set to music. An invaluable insight into 1980s image-making technology, and a showcase of the Aniputer's uniquely user-friendly interface (using a joystick) that allowed beginner users to create effects previously limited to television studios and programmers.
The film includes excerpts from Lessard's original Aniputer works, including Lips (1985) and 4 Improvisations (1985).
Miguel Raymond & Alain Thibault, Extract from OUT, 1986, 4 min, video
An extract from Raymond & Thibault's science fiction "video opera", first performed live in 1985 at the Spectrum music hall in Montreal, where the Aniputer was used to process images live. The original concept envisioned the world in 2090, characterised by the practice of "psychic immigration" to "OUT-realities" through which earth's inhabitants could escape its planetary shortcomings. OUT was imagined as a government-distributed information video promoting this new, attractive modern lifestyle. The versatility and dynamism of the Aniputer's effects are on full display in this saturated vision of the future.
Introduction: the Animaker & Aniputer
By Mia Parnall
From direct animation onto film, video and community-access television, to experimental projection devices using water and glass, Ko Nakajima's career has been dedicated to testing the perceptual, social and commercial limits of image-making technology. Following exposure to and experiments with computer image-processing throughout the 1970s, in 1979 Nakajima launched the first of his consumer-oriented image-processing devices in collaboration with electronics giant Sony. Continuing from Nakajima's early interest in frame-by-frame animation on film, the Animaker was a device for creating time-lapse animations, which automatically took frame-by-frame shots and performed effect processing. Documented in the San Francisco magazine Video 80, the machine sold about 100 units commercially, and its effects can be seen in certain versions of Nakajima's Biological Cycle and Mandala.
Animaker Sony Demo Reel outlines the various utilities of the Animaker - its compact form, ease of use, and particularly its educational value. As stated in the video, "The difference with the Animaker is you can play it back immediately, learning as you go." Michael Goldberg, the producer of this English-language demo, is a Canadian video artist who was involved in the technological side of moving-image art in Japan, having assisted at what is generally regarded as the first video art exhibition/ workshop in Japan at the Ginza Sony building in 1972 which taught its participants to use the recently launched Sony Portapak. While more niche than the Portapak, the Animaker made animating objects, images and people easy and fun and represented a continuation of Nakajima's career-long technical and philosophical interest in animation.
Goldberg would continue supporting Nakajima's inventions beyond his work with Sony, when three years later, Nakajima launched a second commercial collaboration, this time with the Japan Victor Company (JVC), resulting in the Aniputer. The Aniputer combined a video camera with a self-contained computer graphics synthesizer system. Uniquely user-friendly, it was one of the first of its kind to be designed with amateur users in mind, and using a joystick instead of a keyboard it could be used by those who had no knowledge of programming. Upon its completion in 1982, Nakajima would travel around the US and Canada demonstrating the machine: in Boston, both at MIT and at the 1982 SIGGRAPH conference which was held there, at the Plug In Media Centre in Winnipeg, Ontario, and at the Satellite Video Exchange Society, an organization co-founded by Michael Goldberg.
The Aniputer was also demonstrated at the PRIM Centre in Montreal in 1983, where it was discovered by video artist Miguel Raymond. After meeting Nakajima at PRIM, Raymond spent four weeks in Tokyo at the Graphic Institute of Technology in 1984 studying the Aniputer with Nakajima himself. Bringing one of the machines back with him to Canada, he used it for several works, both to modulate video images and integrate dynamic symbols and text into works. In the 'video opera' OUT (1986), a collaboration with composer Alain Thibault, the dynamic range of effects made possible by the Aniputer, from colorization to stop-motion animation complement the rhythm of human bodies from dancers to commuters, in motion. Raymond also used the Aniputer in live performances in conjunction with his own invention, a midi video instrument called the Videotizer.
Another supporter of the Aniputer in Canada was video artist George Lessard. Lessard also encountered the Aniputer at a workshop with Nakajima in Montreal. Taken with its intuitive interface, Lessard had one imported from Japan. After first translating the manual into English with the help of a Japanese friend working at the Banff Centre for Performing Arts, Lessard took on the task of promoting the device by hosting workshops across the country: in Montreal, at Inter-Access in Toronto, at Video Pool in Winnipeg, at EM Media in Calgary, and also at the Satellite Video Exchange Society, involving local artists and interested participants. His Digital Manipulations of the Aniputer (1985) is a demo video of the Aniputer; unfolding as a step-by-step guide to its functions from image modulation, to graphic synthesis, to text animation. It also integrates footage from several of his own Aniputer works, including Lips (1985) and 4 Improvisations (1985), a series of animations set to the music of an experimental jazz quartet. In 1986, Lessard's work Rumblesphinx, which used the Aniputer to bring to life a story of an ordinary working man transported back to ancient Egypt, won the Award of Excellence at the 10th JVC Tokyo Video Festival. He has also used the Aniputer in his work recording dance performances at the Banff Centre and with Bahamian performance troupe Fresh Roots Theater Company.
As an admirer and user of Nakajima's invention as well as a fellow video artist, Lessard has praised Nakajima's ability to collaborate with big companies to produce these commercially viable yet experimental devices such as the Aniputer, something no doubt informed by structural conditions in 1980s Japan, quite unlike those in Canada at the time. Lacking government funding for the arts, yet with a booming commercial tech industry in need of art-world kudos, Japan's situation was leveraged by tenacious artists like Nakajima who rerouted the profits of big tech to support their own work and to bring high-grade equipment to others like them.
George Lessard
Lessard is an electronic media and digital artist born in Rosemère, north of Montreal, Canada. He has held various positions in the field of media, communications and education across the world: Toronto, Vancouver, Banff Calgary, Yellowknife, Inuvik, and Fort Smith Northwest Territories, Salluit, Nunavik (Arctic) Quebec & Arviat, Nunavut, Beijing, China; Nassau, the Bahamas; La Paz, Bolivia; Butare, Rwanda; Chelyabinsk, Russia; Berhampur, Odisha, India and Manu, Peru.
Later in the 1980s he studied at the Banff Centre in Alberta, where he discovered and began to work with Ko Nakajima’s Aniputer. He toured Canada holding Aniputer workshops: at VIDEO POOL, Winnipeg; EM MEDIA, Calgary; INTER-ACCESS, Toronto; the VISUAL STUDIES WORKSHOP, Rochester, NY; and La Maison de la Culture du Plateau Mt. Royal Montrèal, in addition to his presentations at Banff. During this time, amongst his many collaborations as video artist & editor, in 1986 the dramatic narrative, video “RUMBLESPHINX” (with video artists Robert Hamilton and Dave Clark) won the 1987 PRIX RADIO-QUEBEC from Quebec’s educational TV network and the AWARD OF EXCELLENCE, 10th TOKYO VIDEO FESTIVAL and was distributed in both the US and Canada by Vidéographe.
Today Lessard creates reflective experiential imagery of is home of Lethbridge, Alberta and its surrounding parries and coulees, on the traditional territory of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Nakoda (Stoney) and Tsuut’ina.
Miguel Raymond
Miguel Raymond is a video artist from Montreal, Canada. He graduated in Communication from the University of Quebec in Montreal and also received training in special effects at the Graphic Institute of Technology in Tokyo (GIT) under the direction of the artist Ko Nakajima. For more than 40 years, he has created and contributed to a wide variety of works and has won several awards both in Canada and abroad.
As a video artist, he was known for exploring cutting-edge technologies. His first experimental video was called "TV Screen," acquired by the Musée d'Art Contemporain (M.A.C.) for its permanent collection, along with his video installation "Ages de Vie." In addition, he has collaborated on numerous works with artists in dance, performance, theater, documentary and video art, from Video84 with the "Platform Video" installation at the M.A.C., to the "Out" video Opera created with Alain Thibault in 1986. His research also led him to the development of a video creation tool: The "Videotizer", a matrix of 8 video inputs distributed over 64 outputs, all controlled by midi interface and able to be played live.
In recent years, he has collaborated in the creation of video projections for Cirque du Soleil's Michael Jackson One in Las Vegas. He also worked with Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon on the multi-media work "Cité Mémoire" which was launched in 2016 and 2017 as part of the celebrations for the 375th anniversary of the city of Montreal. Recently, he has signed several works, including, among others, the experimental films "Un dia en la vida" and "Prélude à la Lune" in 2021. In 2022 he created "Sakura" and "Solstice" part of The Cycle of Life Series, and the dance film "Fallen Love."
Ko Nakajima
Ko Nakajima began his career in experimental animation with the creation of works such as Seizoki (1964). At his solo exhibition at the Sogetsu Art Center, a space for avant-garde art in 1960s Tokyo, he produced Seizoki by painting directly on the film between screenings. His perennial interest in integrating new technologies, exploring the potential of film, video, and eventually computer animation, joined his desire to explore human intersections with nature, as seen in his Biological Cycle series (1971-); he created the first work in the series, Biological Life (1971-), by copying manipulated film footage onto video, then further manipulating the work with a video synthesizer.
In 1971, Nakajima established Video Earth Tokyo, the pioneering video-art collective. Nakajima used one of the earliest available portable video recorders to document Video Earth Tokyo performance pieces and teach the new technology. Video Earth Tokyo members created works, broadcast works on cable television, and participated in international exhibitions and emergent CG (computer graphics) conferences. In 1982, Nakajima introduced his Aniputer. Aniputer technology allowed wide access to creation of video animation, as this personal portable computer integrated with a video camera, developed in collaboration with Japan Victor Company (JVC), allowed any user to directly manipulate video and images on a screen, creating animations in real time. Nakajima used his expertise manipulating film, photography, and video with computer technology to create what is perhaps his best known work, Mt. Fuji (1984), a ninety-minute rhythmic meditation on nature, spirituality, and perspective.
Nakajima has produced works in France, Canada, New Zealand, and Denmark. Representative works include Biological Cycle series (1971-), My Life series (1976-), Mt. Fuji (1984), and Dolmen (1987). His works are in permanent collections internationally, including in Centre Georges Pompidou (France), The Museum of Modern Art (U.S.), Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive (U.S.), and the Getty Research Institute Special Collections (U.S.).
community of images: Japanese moving image artists in the uS, 1960s - 1970s
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s will be an exhibition of experimental moving images created by Japanese artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s, an area that has fallen in the fissure between American and Japanese archival priorities. Following JASGP's Re:imagining Recovery Project and its mission to support and engage diverse audiences through Japanese arts and culture in collaboration with local organizations, this project aims to discover, preserve, and present film and video works and performance footage by Japanese filmmakers and artists to the wider public.
We have partnered with the University of the Arts, and will present this exhibition at the Philadelphia Arts Alliance in June - August 2024.
The project and its online programming is generously supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage & the Andy Warhol Foundation.