Aiueonn--Six Features and a Game of Words Which Starts With the Letter A (review)

AIUEONN--Six Features and a Game of Words which Starts with the Letter A.CD-ROM by Takahiko Iimura. Published by Heure Exquise!, France, 1999. Mac and PC, 640 x 480 screen. ISBN: 4-901181-02-5. In English and Japanese.

As a conceptualist and minimalist, filmmaker/video-artist Takahiko (Taka) Iimura might seem to represent some kind of anti-film. From this point of view, it may not be surprising that he has busied himself in recent years with making CD-ROMs and a website (http://www2.gol.com/users/iimura/Front.html), primarily with the purpose of presenting and re-working earlier works. As a conceptualist, Iimura cares more for flexible media in which he can present his ideas than for filmic or videographic experiences in an essentialist or aesthetic sense. At the same time, his ideas are always inseparable from the medium itself.

The CD-ROM Interactive AIUEONN is about the idea of letting six facial (or oral) expressions represent six sounds (namely A, I, U, E, O, N), and to construct a game that plays on the differences between the visual and the aural/oral, between English and Japanese. Iimura did this for the first time in 1982, in a video installation at the Victor Video Center in Tokyo. In 1993, he presented a new version of the same video in the Kirin Plaza, Osaka. The present CD-ROM is a re-working of this later version, with its grotesque distortions of the artist's face when he pronounces the sounds. The first five sounds--A, I, U, E and O--are Japanese vowels; the last one, N, is the only Japanese consonant with which a word can end.

The CD-ROM consists of three parts. The first one is the Demo, which shows, very slowly, six digital video-clips with the artist's distorted face(s) pronouncing the sounds. Each sound/clip has its own background color: A is red, I is yellow, U is green, E is blue, O is white, N is black. In this way, each sound becomes associated with a grotesque face ("feature") and a color. When shown in Western or Japanese phonetic script (katakana or hiragana), they are colored in the same way. In the second, "interactive" part of the CD, one is supposed to alter the relations between pictures/colors and sounds. If one chooses the picture/color "A," for example, one cannot choose the sound "A" to accompany the picture but has to choose another sound. Depending upon one's choice, the relations between all the other sounds and pictures are then automatically re-grouped and re-played in a new order. This is a very simple but striking statement about the arbitrariness of semiotic relations.

Any exact phonetic correspondence between a sound and a written symbol is, of course, purely illusory and conventional. Likewise, it is unlikely that someone with any experience of foreign languages would claim the possibility of exact translation from one language to another. If I were to write this in Swedish, for instance, I would never be able to express exactly the same content or sense. Iimura's experience of living in the gap between two very different languages and semiotic systems, English and Japanese, is expressed in the third part of the CD, which is a game of words for two players. When one plays it, one uses the six faces/colors to construct Japanese words. The words have to start with the vowel "A." Once a word is formed, the scoring is made according to word length, and the word is shown in hiragana or katakana (phonetic script), in kanji (ideograms) and in English. This CD is both simple and tricky, and also a funny lesson in Japanese. My four-year old son loves it, especially the crazy features--that may be the best credit an artist can get.

 

Fred Andersson,
Ulvsbygatan 29 (6), 654 64...