Morihiro Wada

This U-matic video incorporates a number of frequent images from Wada's oeuvre: a camera advancing down a colonnaded pedestrian walkway beneath an elevated train line, the figure of a woman with her back to the camera retreating down a street toward a vanishing point by walking or running, and various seascapes. These scenes are spliced together in seemingly random order, sometimes inserted into each other or reshot through close-ups of video monitors. At times the footage is so heavily mediated and re-mediated that images blur into shadow and light, disappear into CRT phosphor dots, or shift hues and patterns from oversaturation and noise. A soundtrack by Hideki Yoshida accompanies the entire sequence, featuring echoing electronic patterns and long tones interspersed with ambient sounds of traffic and beachfront waves. This work was first screened at the Worldwide Video Festival in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Netherlands, in 1986.

A member of the collective Video Hiroba, Morihiro Wada also used video in his solo projects. In The Recognition Construction, each subject entering the frame is identified by a narrator, while the video camera slowly rotates. As the rotation speeds up the identification becomes more difficult, and the objects ultimately become "indecipherable."

Originally shot on 16mm film and presented at Maki Gallery, this work primarily focuses on traffic traveling up and down the major traffic artery Omotesandō in Tokyo. Prefaced by the Wittgenstein quotation included below, the image focuses on the vanishing point—aligning it with the top of the frame in wide shots—and movements of vehicles up and down the boulevard. While the film's first half presents a stationary shot, the second half follows individual cars and motorbikes, zooming in to frame them at a consistent size even as they advance toward and recede from the camera.

A static image of a rock next to a curb is overlaid with the deformed reflection of light and shadows from pedestrian and vehicular traffic. An alternatively whispy and shrill, irregular slide whistle soundtrack is occasionally punctuated by a male voice saying "this is," culminating in an insistent string of "this is, this is, this is." Once the soundtrack falls silent, the camera begins to haltingly zoom out, revealing the reflection to have been caused by the slick surface of the glossy photo of the curb, and the picture itself to have been one of a series of photos of urban details placed in a grid in an exhibition space.