There is profound in the mundane and mundane in the profound - it all depends on your viewpoint and way of thinking... See http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ for my main website.
I've always enjoyed color, but a couple of things in my life have caused me to take a harder look at color, and think about what it means, and how it is perceived.
The first was a pre-cell phone experience in about... 1985 or 1986 I think it was. Pre-cell phone, you would arrange to meet people by agreeing to meet at a coffee shop. That way, whoever got there first could sit down and relax while waiting for the other person to show up.
One such day in Harajuku I arrived at a coffee shop early, and felt really lucky to get the table right in front of the window (it was a long, narrow shop, so there was just one such table). I ordered a coffee, and then as I slowly drank it, I contemplated the world outside on the Omotesando street. Normal enough thing for the time, but an added element made it even more interesting. Someone had a bunch of flowers set up in front of the coffee shop (an actual flower shop maybe, but more likely through some agreement with the coffee shop).
As I began to drink my coffee, I observed a woman buy some flowers, and then, while waiting for her change, she looked at the flowers in her hand and had this really happy expression on her face.... I thought, "She must really like flowers..." As I continued to drink my coffee while waiting for my acquaintance to arrive, I observed another customer buying flowers - also a woman, and also showing that happy look while looking at the flowers. "Huh... just like the last customer..." thought I.
If it had only been those two customers, I probably would have just forgotten about it, but I observed several other people buying flowers, all women, and all of them looked upon the flowers they bought with that happy expression on their faces. It was quite striking! At the time, I remember thinking, "I like flowers too, but I don't recall them making me feel happy the way they seem to be making that parade of women customers happy... they must be seeing something I don't when looking at flowers..."
Fast forward a couple of decades and there was some research done on how men and women perceive colors and (if I'm remembering this correctly) the result was that women are far more perceptive of color than men. When I read that, I immediately had a flashback to that day - watching people buying flowers from that coffee shop window in Omotesando (near Harajuku Station).
Fast forward some more, and I've found I recently appreciate flowers and their colors in a way I haven't before. As an example, the flowers in the vase further up the page. I carried them home from Shinagawa poking out of the top of my bag. So who gave them a good look in the train? Women.... I'm sure part of the issue is men are supposed to be like cold steel and uninterested in the fragile beauty of flowers, but there's some other element too it seems. How did I feel carrying them home so publicly? I wish I could respond here with, "Huh? What do you mean?", but I found myself feeling defensive about them, thinking basically, "Yeah, that's right, a guy is carrying some flowers home. You got a problem with that?" Why? Well, no other guys had flowers sticking out of their bags and several woman were checking out the flowers with radio wave questions in the air.....
I'm a fairly heavy computer user, but have yet to begin using a smartphone, so as I observe how just about everyone around me out in pubic is almost constantly looking at and poking their little microcomputers, I'm beginning to worry about what direction humanity is going. It seems like people are turning over more and more of their thinking to the microcomputers almost constantly in their hands, so what will be the outcome of this? Hopefully not dysfunctional people who can't communicate with others or navigate their world without a machine constantly telling them what to do. ........... I just had an awful thought - in a very real sense, some people (many people?, [shudder] most people?) are becoming cyborgs!
Don't get me wrong - I'm actually quite enthusiastic about technology, but with regards to cell phones, smartphones , etc., I believe in shutting them down for at least part of the day. With the computer, I understand only too well how the endless stream of possibilities while on-line keeps me looking at one thing or another, and I enjoy it, but I also enjoy some time with the machine shut down so I can concentrate on one thing. (In fact, I'm writing this right now off-line, as I figured I wouldn't get far with any text if I tried writing it with the gateway open.)
About the title "Rewiring of Brain?" - I was reading an article about something on-line and it stated that people's brains had been rewired with the advent of books. I had never heard that before, but it got me to thinking. I have long believed the brain changes depending on how it's used, which is why I think horror movies should be illegal. What we read, watch, listen to, etc., is akin to programming a (biological) computer, and "garbage in - garbage out", as used to be said (still is?) about computer programming. So the opposite should be aimed for - "quality in - quality out".
I've been into photography since I was s small child and so recording images via film, tape, IC chip, and whatever comes next, is of perpetual interest to me. But what has come to occupy a larger percentage of my time than recording new images, is the analog video material I recorded from early 1990 through to mid-1993 - from reviewing, editing, posting, and responding to comments from viewers, to thinking about the nature of change....
To a certain extent, change is something I tend to think about anyway, but I've noticed that the number one aspect to the 1990-93 videos that generates pretty radically different responses is change, specifically whether things have, or have not changed in the past 28 years or so. I think 28 years is an interesting amount of time - almost exactly one generation. Without actually researching it, I think 28 must not be far off the mark for the average age people had children in 1991, and now some of those children are having children themselves....
I would like to write about this in an orderly and logical way, but as I finished the above paragraph, I realized there were several aspects to the concept suddenly competing for attention. I stopped writing for a couple of minutes and stared at the picture above (of 1991 Hibarigaoka)... finally reaching the conclusion that it's impossible to do this in a really orderly way and/or I don't have time to do it that way, so I'll just run through some things in the order they reach my typing fingertips, and not worry about what really deserves to come first.
So - the picture above of 1991 Hibarigaoka Station - is of the station before it was completely rebuilt. I think this is something any sane person would agree has changed... which brings up a strange sub-category to this concept. For some videos, which depict a place that has changed quite radically, some biped or other out there will respond "Nothing has changed!". I suppose that when someone declares that something that has very clearly changed, has not changed, they are trying to provoke an argument, or maybe they are mentally deranged? Who knows!
But there are many places where, depending on what you were expecting from the number "1991", things are either surprisingly the same, or surprisingly different. Add in the many detailed elements that make up reality and time that are not clearly visible in a recorded image, and there are things that are quite different on a kind of radio frequency level and thus not evident to all.
And... stepping way way waaaaaaaay back, there are elements to a society/culture that are remarkably resistant to change. When I read "The Journal Of Francis Hall, 1859-1866", I was struck by several cultural elements that he described that left me thinking "Well, that's the same as now!". Initially, when reading an account of things from about 150 years before, you expect any and everything to be different, but on a cultural level, much of a culture carries forward at least partly (or perhaps mainly) due to the power of language and how a culture is enshrined in its vocabulary, sentence structures, etc., and how they are used.
Video as time machine. I used to joke to a programmer friend when I saw them, "So, have you invented a time machine yet?" which they would laughingly wave off and laugh at, but one day, when I asked my tiresome question, "Have you invented a time machine yet? I want a time machine!" they didn't laugh, and instead looked off thoughtfully into the distance and said something along the lines of "It would require an immense amount of data storage..." which surprised me, but then I started thinking about it, and the concept of a time machine consisting of detailed recordings of the past started to seem like something other than a joke. There are many aspects to this concept, but here's one experience I had that really did feel like a time machine experience:
I was talking with a group of people in a conference room and I was using a large screen TV as a monitor for writing notes (to give to the group) when someone mentioned how they were going to a party. I asked where, and they described renting an apartment someone set up specifically for people to rent to give parties at, and I responded "Oh, I went to a party at such a place back in the Bubble Era, in 1990... and then realized I could actually take them there. I typed in the relevant search terms on the computer and suddenly the June 1990 party was in full swing on the large screen TV, with stereo sound no less. With the large screen and the quality sound, it really felt like we had jumped back in time, and - in a way - we had. A couple of decades later, we were (again for me, first time for the others) experiencing a 1990 Bubble Era party....
And so, when someone recently commented on YouTube how one of the 1991 videos made the viewer feel as though it was a kind of time machine, I responded with this:
"Thank you for commenting! I'm finding them to feel that way for me too, probably even more so, since I was behind the camera at the time. On some level, I knew some of the things I took would only be viewable via a recording in the future, but I think what really drove me at the time was that I found Japan to be an intensely interesting place and thought that there was too much focus on places like Kyoto and on anything deemed new and/or strange, so I strongly felt the normal things in the city (Tokyo mostly) needed to be recorded. It took a couple of decades for technology to advance to the point where I had a platform to show people. The main downside to this is that so much of my material is copied and used without my permission...."
