仮の大地
上村洋一

Temporary Ground
KAMIMURA Yoichi

2019.05.31 fri - 06.21 fri

上村は 2010 年頃から風景を主題に、視覚と聴覚との関係性の中で作品を展開してきました。初期の作品は作曲家エリック・サティの楽曲や楽譜、音や状態を表現する言語であるオノマトペなど、過去に作られた音楽や言語を解体・再構成して、風景を概念的に捉えた音響作品を作ってきました。
その後、2011 年の大震災直後の水戸芸術館での個展に出品したサウンド・インスタレーション作品「night passage」を境に上村の作品や制作態度は変化していきます。大震災による自然災害や人災を目の当たりにし、より直接的に風景・環境に対峙する必要性を感じた上村はフィールド・レコーディ
ングによって得られる環境音を制作の主な素材として用いていくようになります。2017 年の台湾での滞在制作では、台湾人画家の陳澄波によって制作された 1 枚の風景画「東台湾臨海道路」をリサーチし、その絵に描かれている原住民・タオ族の住む島・蘭嶼に赴きます。そこで原子力廃棄物を貯蔵している港の環境音や、彼等の伝統的な唄を録音し、それらの音と、蘭嶼の象徴的な色でもある赤土を組み合わせ、「ambient colors, ambient songs」を発表しました。このように、ドイツ、スイス、ニューヨー
ク、台湾そして日本などの世界各地の環境音を録音し、作品を制作・発表する中で上村は、それまで概念的に環境を捉えていたスタンスを徐々に変化させ、より知覚的なアプローチにシフトしていきました。
上村がマイクロフォンとフィールドレコーダーという録音機材によって採集する環境音は、大潮の日の荒れ狂う海中の音や、重厚なモダニズム建築の内部の微細な振動など、普段は聴くことのない音から、都市の騒音や人々の話し声などの私たちの日常の生活音まで多岐に渡ります。上村はフィールド・レコーディングという行為を極めてプライベートな聴取経験とし、その経験や記憶は他の誰とも共有不可能な経験と位置づけています。しかし、そのような行為から得られる音を作品環境の一部にすることで上村は、作家の持つ個人的な経験や記憶と、私たちが生きる世界を取り巻く人間の知覚閾値を越えた事象、この 2 つが同居するハイブリッドな環境を、展示空間というパブリックな空間に生成しようと試みています。
4 年ぶりとなる個展「仮の大地」は流氷から得られる音や物質を採集・再構成することによって、私たちを取り巻くもの - 環境について考察した展覧会です。上村は 2019 年 2 月から 3 月にかけて北海道大学科学技術コミュニケーション教育研究部門（CoSTEP）との協働研究プロジェクトのもと、北海道斜里郡に滞在し、オホーツク海の流氷の環境をリサーチしました。遠くシベリアの海で氷結し、北海道北部に流れ着く流氷群は近年の地球温暖化や気候変動による影響を受け、減衰しながら変化を続けています。そのような人間世界の影響を受けつつも、その白く冷たい塊はあらゆる生命の循環に欠かせない海中のプランクトンを運んでいます。上村は、私たちの生きるこの世界を「人為的な影響を受けながら形成される環境の循環」と捉えています。オホーツク海の流氷は、この上村の考えを示唆する物質であり事象なのです。そして、上村はこの流氷のような自然物とも人工物とも呼べない存在を「仮の大地」と名付け、流氷が内包する音と物質を使い、私たちを取り巻く不確かで曖昧なエコロジーを表出させようと試みます。

STATEMENT

なぜ、流氷の音を録りたいと思ったのだろう。
いくつか理由があるのだろうが、ひとつには流氷という事象を音で捉えることで、自分自身が漠然とした環境世界と繋がっていけるような感覚があったからだろう。とても個人的な理由と感覚だ。私は流氷の音を通じて、それが作られ流れてくるための地形や気候、海流、流氷が運んでくる小さな生命や物質、そして流氷と共に生きるものたち、こうしたものに接近し、私たちの周りを漂っている言いようのない環境世界をもっとはっきりとした形で見出そうとしているのかもしれない。
流氷の上でじっとしながら、ただただ音を聴いていると、流氷同士がぶつかるスケールの大きな音か
はすはごおりら、蓮葉氷の中から小さな空気が抜けてぷちぷちと鳴る微視的な音などがあり、まるでこの地球を顕微鏡で拡大したり縮小したりして見ているような気分になる。そして自分が人間世界や社会から切り離されて、氷だけの世界へ漂って行ってしまうような感覚に陥る。それはとてもロマンチックではあるけれど、つぎの瞬間、遠くで流氷ウォークをする観光客の戯れる声が聴こえて来て、そんな感覚はなんだか馬鹿げているなと我に返る。
ふと、目の前の流氷の上をよく見てみると、キツネの足跡が遥か遠くの流氷まで繋がっている。彼等はきっと軽やかに流氷の上をトコトコ歩いて食べ物を探しているんだろう。冬のあいだ彼等にとっては、この氷の上が生きる為の大地となる。かつて人間もキツネのように、氷の大地を歩いてユーラシア大陸から移動してきたのだろうか。今は氷が大陸間を繋ぐことなど無く、そんな光景を見ることは決して無い。それでも今、自分が聴いている氷の音は、見たことも無い昔の光景や、遥か彼方のシベリアから漂ってくる流氷の姿を想像させる。
翌日また同じ場所に行ってみると、昨日の流氷の姿は無く、遠く沖の方で漂っていた。昨日は歩いて行ける程に近くに留まっていたのに。その日の気温や風向きによって彼等は形を変え、また新しい場所で新しい姿を見せる。それはまるで、一時的に生まれては消える陸地 -「仮の大地」だ。その光景を見るたびに、私たち人間が生きる大地も決して永遠のものではなく、変化を続けていると感じる。
そしてその大地は人間の世界から出るエネルギーや物質の影響を受けながら、新しい環境を形成していく。オホーツク海の流氷もまた年々減衰しているそうだ。地球温暖化や気候変動の影響は想像に難くない。そう考えると、沖の方で漂っているあの流氷群は人工的に形成されているのかもしれないと思うようになった。時には分厚くて頼りがいがあり、そして時には薄く透明で弱々しい、あの白くて冷たい塊は自然物とも人工物とも言えない曖昧な存在として、私たちの周りを漂っている。その掴みどころの無い、不安にも似たような存在の鳴き声 - この鳴き声は、その存在が仮のものであることの証明だ - を「仮の大地」の上で私は今ひとりで聴いている。私はその鳴き声を採集し、再結晶させることで、曖昧でよく見えない不確かなエコロジーの世界を摑み取りたい。

仮の大地
上村洋一

Temporary Ground
KAMIMURA Yoichi

2019.05.31 fri - 06.21 friKamimura has been developing his work on the relationship between sight and sound, within the theme of scenery, since2010. In his early work he made acoustic art which conceptually captured landscapes and scenery, and he dismantled andreconstructed language and sounds made in the past, such as onomatopoeia, words that express sounds and states, andthe musical scores and tunes of composer Erik Satie.
Following those early steps, his artwork and work ethic could be seen to change along the borders of his sound installation“Night Passage”, which was shown at a solo exhibition at Art Tower Mito right after the 2011 earthquake disaster. He saw
with his own eyes the natural disasters and man-made disasters caused by the earthquake disaster, and felt it wasnecessary to directly confront the landscape and environment, and so he began using environmental sounds, which wereobtained via ﬁeld recordings, as his main subject matter for his creative work. At an artist residency in Taiwan in 2017 heresearched a landscape painting called the “East Taiwan Coastal Road” by Taiwanese painter Chen Cheng-Po, and visited
Orchid Island, an island where an indigenous people, the Tao, live who can be seen in the painting. There, he recorded theirtraditional songs and also the environmental sounds of the port where nuclear waste is stored, produced “ambient colors,ambient songs”, which saw the combination of red soil, to symbolize Orchid Island, with those sounds. Similarly, he hasrecorded environmental sounds from around the world, including both Japan and as far aﬁeld as Germany, Switzerland, theUS, and Taiwan. Amongst the artwork that he has created and exhibited, there has been a steady change in his stance ofconceptually capturing the environment, and a shift to a more perceptive approach.
The environmental sounds collected by Kamimura through recording equipment, such as microphones and ﬁeld recorders,crosses over a diverse range of sounds, from ones we do not usually hear such as the raging currents of the sea on a springtide day, to the sounds of our own daily lives, like the noise of the city, and people talking. Kamimura highly regards his ﬁeld
recordings as extremely private listening experiences, which are, along with his memories, something which canʼ t beshared with anyone else. However, by making the sounds he has obtained from these activities a part of his work
environment, Kamimura is trying to create within the public space of an exhibition a hybrid environment that brings
together two points. The private experiences and memories of the artist himself, and phenomena beyond the perception
threshold of humans which enclose the world in which we live.
Temporary Ground is his ﬁrst solo exhibition in four years, and it is one that has examined the environment, something thatsurrounds us, through the collection and reconstruction of substances and sounds obtained from drift ice. He stayed in
Shari District, Hokkaido, and researched the environment of drift ice in the Sea of Okhotsk, under a collaborative research
project with Hokkaido Universityʼs Communication in Science & Technology Education & Research Program (CoSTEP) fromFebruary to March 2019. Drift ice freezes over in faraway Siberia and packs of it drifts down to the shores of northern
Hokkaido, and they have declined while continuing to transform due to the inﬂuence in recent years of global warming andclimate change. Despite this human inﬂuence, these cold white chunks transport sea life such as plankton, which areessential for diﬀerent kinds of life cycles. He captures this world which we all live in as an “environmental circulation that isbeing formed while it is being artiﬁcially inﬂuenced”. The drift ice in the Sea of Okhotsk is a material phenomenon thathints at his thoughts. Kamimura has named this existence as Temporary Ground, as it isnʼ t a natural object like this drift
ice, nor is it an artiﬁcial one, and using materials and sounds that encompass drift ice, he tries to express an uncertain, andambiguous ecology, which surrounds us.

STATEMENT

Why did I want to record the sound of drift ice?

I think that there are several reasons, but one particular reason is probably my own sensation of connecting with a vague
umwelt (the biological foundations that lie at the center of communication and signiﬁcance in humans and non-humans)by capturing, through sound, the phenomena of drift ice. This is a very personal reason, and sensation. Through the soundof drift ice I seek to approach the substances and small lives which are carried by the ice, by the ocean currents, and theliving things which share it, and the climate and terrain in which the ice is made and ﬂows. It is perhaps that I am trying todiscover a clearer form of an indescribable umwelt that drifts around us.

As I stand atop the drift ice, while completely absorbed in listening to its sounds, which range from the loud bangs of thedrift ice colliding together to the tiny sounds of small air pockets escaping from within pancake ice, I am made to feel as if
I am seeing our world through a microscope which I can zoom in and out of. Also, I really felt separated from the society
and world of humanity, and that I was falling into a sensation like I was drifting away into a world of pure ice. This is very
romantic, but a moment later I could hear the voices of some tourists who far away were fooling around while walking on
the drift ice and the sensation passed as some silly experience while I returned to myself.

By chance, when looking more closely at the drift ice in front of my eyes, I noticed the footprints of a fox which extended
far across the ice. I imagine it was searching for food as it trotted lightly over the top of the drift ice. For that fox, when it
is winter, the top of the ice becomes land on which they can live. Once human beings too, just like foxes, walked over thisland ice and I guess migrated from the Eurasian continent. Today the ice doesnʼ t connect continents, so I will never beable to see such a sight. Still even now, when I listen to the sound of the ice I can visualize drift ice as it ﬂoats down fromdistant Siberia, and past landscapes which I have never seen.

The next day I went to the same place again, but the drift ice I saw the day before was gone and had moved oﬀshore. Thiswas despite it being close enough to walk on when I ﬁrst saw it. Drift ice changes shape according to the local
temperature and wind direction, and also it can be seen in new places, with a diﬀerent appearance. It is really just likeland, which is born temporarily and then disappears - this is Temporary Ground. When I see this, I can feel that the worldthat us humans live on isnʼ t by any means eternal, and will continue to change. This world is inﬂuenced by the materials
and energy produced by humans, while it is forming a new environment. The drift ice in the Sea of Okhotsk also seems tobe declining year after year. It is not diﬃcult to imagine the eﬀect that global warming and climate change is having.
When I considered this I came to the idea that the packs of drift ice out on the open sea could be artiﬁcially formed.
Sometimes it is thick and reliable, and sometimes it is thin, transparent and weak. It is a white, cold mass that drifts allaround us, as something that has an ambiguous existence which canʼ t be said to be a natural object or an artiﬁcial one.
The roar of their existences, which is like an uneasy, or missing, grip, is a roar which is their own evidence of theirtemporary existence, and on top of this Temporary Ground I now listen alone. By collecting these roars, andreconstructing them, I would like to grasp a world of uncertain ecology which canʼ t be seen well in its own ambiguity.