Toshio Iwai — Time Stratum I and early interactive media practice

1985

Artists: Toshio Iwai · Year: 1985 · Medium: Interactive kinetic-optical installations — phenakistiscope-era optical-toy principles extended with electronic controls · Substrate: Rotating disks with animated sequences; stroboscopic lighting; electronic control systems; some installations incorporating early computer-graphics displays · Place: Tokyo, Japan · Institution: Independent; later collaborations with NHK and Yamaha Toshio Iwai's Time Stratum II (1985) is a rotating stroboscopic zoetrope: a vertical disc mounted with a spiral arrangement of small three-dimensional figurines, illuminated by a precisely-timed flashing strobe light. As the disc rotates under the strobe, the figurines appear to animate — a bird flaps its wings, a figure walks, the sequence plays — because each strobe flash illuminates one figurine in a different pose, exactly as the next-frame's pose arrives at the fixed viewing position. The piece is a pre-digital computer-graphics technique — frame-by-frame motion, specified by physical objects, synchronized by a strobe — and it produces something that looks, unmistakably, like a computer-rendered animation. Iwai had been making animation since his undergraduate days at the Tsukuba University school of art, where he studied with the experimental animator Nobuhiro Kawanaka. His innovation in the Time Stratum series was to notice that animation could be decomposed into two entirely separable problems — the arrangement of the frames in space, and the mechanism that presents them in time — and that if you separated them and built each one physically, you got a sculpture that behaved like cinema and a cinema that behaved like sculpture. The strobe was the projector; the disc was the film strip; the figurines were the frames. This archive cares about Time Stratum for a specific reason. Iwai would go on, over the next decade, to become the single most inventive Japanese interactive-media artist of his generation — collaborating with Ryuichi Sakamoto on Music Plays Images X Images Play Music (1996, winner of the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica), designing the Tenori-On electronic instrument (2005) with Yamaha, and making the ICC installation works in Tokyo that are the Japanese reference for interactive-media installation. The Time Stratum zoetropes are the first fully-developed version of the Iwai method: take a computational concept (frame-based animation), decompose it into physical parts, and rebuild the whole in a medium where the computational structure is visible in the room. Iwai is still working; his studio is in Tokyo. The Time Stratum zoetropes were acquired by the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in 1997 and are exhibited periodically. Lore Iwai built the first Time Stratum disc in his university studio with a turntable motor borrowed from a high-school AV department, a hand-built strobe circuit, and figurines sculpted from polymer clay during evenings and weekends over several months. He has said in several interviews that he was initially disappointed with the piece — the rotation was not smooth, the strobe timing drifted — and that it was his professor Kawanaka who convinced him that the imperfections were part of what made the animation feel hand-made rather than machine-made. Iwai took the advice. The surviving Time Stratum II disc has the original hand-cast figurines, now forty years old, still rotating on the original motor, which has been rebuilt three times. Iwai himself is in his late 50s, works nights in a small Tokyo studio with his children's help, and continues to invent new sculptural-animation apparatus. Sources • NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), Tokyo — Toshio Iwai collection files. • Ars Electronica Archive — Toshio Iwai 1997 Golden Nica citation. • Iwai, Toshio — artist website and studio archive.