w/ 026 GD

type: object / image
function: table
location: chuo, tokyo
collaborator: aoyagi natsumi (datsuo) ghost furniture
date: 2025.4.26

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Art set design for Natsumi Aoyagi’s 《NNC – Today’s Event β》.

Aoyagi based her story on the myth of the ‘Dragon God’ and intended the anchor’s reading platform to appear allegorically and symbolically in her video work in the broadcast and news format.

The table was made by tracing the outline of the Ogasawara Islands, where there is a legend of the Dragon God, and collaging the islands of Chichi-jima (‘Father Island’), Haha-jima (‘Mother Island’), Ani-jima (‘Elder Brother Island’), Otōto-jima (‘Younger Brother Island’), Ane-jima (‘Elder Sister Island’) and Imōto-jima (‘Younger Sister Island’) to create a table with a top that represents an island that might have existed. Acrylic tubes were used for the legs, in reference to the reading tables of past news programmes, and aluminium tubes were also used as a complement.

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Friday 25, April, 2025, cloudy

As the sky darkens earlier than usual, I go to a preview of ‘godzilla the art’, where my friend Datsuo (Natsumi Aoyagi) is exhibiting her work. The place is Roppongi Hills. It’s the third time I’ve been to Roppongi in the last week.

The video work entitled ‘NNC – Today’s Event Beta’ was very charming and full of intellectual humour. It would take a lot of effort to write about it in detail, and the points of interest will be different for each viewer, so I won’t go into too much detail, but it was a very funny piece on the subject of dragons, and also reminded me of something important that I had forgotten.

As you can see from the title, this film is about a TV news programme, and the images clearly show how conscious TV news is of getting things right. The content of the script read by the announcer and the images match. The studio background is clean and uncluttered, and each news item is independent, clear and free of narrative or poetry. The film is structured in such a way that it betrays all these conventions. That is why, no matter how many times you watch it, each time you get a new perspective.

This is abstracted in the text that appears on the screen towards the end of the programme. The text, which runs in a band from the top to the bottom of the screen, is a poem written by Datsuo, but it is impossible to read it properly because several lines flow simultaneously and disappear from the screen. All we can do is pick up a few words with our eyes and connect them ourselves. I thought this was a really interesting way of expressing poetry. Discreet and allegorical!

Coming back to the news programmes, the news we are used to watching is produced in a routine and well-organised way. But what about the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake? I wondered if the news programmes broadcast in the midst of chaos and crisis were actually full of mixed information and emotional narratives like those in this film.

Scenes of news coverage are always shown in panic films. It is probably because these scenes are so familiar to Godzilla fans that Datsuo chose them as the subject of her work. Hats off to her ability to juxtapose this universal theme with a new poetic expression. It gave me a lot of courage.

The table used as the anchor’s reading platform in the film was designed by my friend, and this extremely oddly shaped table was the only thing that functioned as a real thing in this programme, which was a mixture of fiction and reality. The table as a fetish, showing that the show was on the border between reality and unreality. An entity like the ‘blue key’ in 《Mulholland Drive》…

Text: h***** k*******