Video Quartet

Multimedia performance
Photo by Emmanuel Valette

Dumb Type is a multimedia performance group formed in 1982 in Kyoto, Japan. The members of the group, who also work independently, consist mainly of graduates from the Kyoto City College of Arts. Each member specializes in a different field: sound, film, writing, architecture, and body performances. They use a very unique collaborative model, working with the absence of language as a method to critically express and maintain the subject. This is significant in the midst of an information society filled with signs and signifiers spilled out without verification.

Collaborative technologies have been used to convert "dumbness" into interpretable language. Everything, including their concepts, is decided through discussions without hierarchy among member artists. The process of recognizing, connecting, and multiplying one another's values is supported with sensitivity toward others.

Memorandum was commissioned in 1999 by Le Manege-Maubeuge in France. This piece aimed to investigate our memory. Combining elements of multimedia, dance, and fragmented narrative, Memorandum explores the hazy dimensions of remembrance that ground and quietly erode our experience minute by minute. Our conscious memory is a logically organized system located in our brain. But before this system is created we have raw fragments of physical memories in our subconscious, which are the materials for the construction of this organized memory. Memorandum is an effort to reconstruct these fragments into consciousness.