Japanese Artist Collective Dumb Type’s Living Legacy

This paper examines Japanese collective Dumb Type (1984– ) whose intermedia performances take an exceptional position at the intersection of art, politics and technology but has been insufficiently acknowledged despite its aesthetics resonant in art history, theatre, and new media art. First, it discusses Dumb Type’s invention of new vocabularies of intermedia performance as a vehicle of cultural critique, directing its close attentions to what is deemed socially undesirable, such as homosexuality, AIDS, old age, and death. It examines Dumb Type’s OR (1997– ) that dealt with the border between life and death or the inbetweenness of being after its leader Teiji Furuhashi’s death of AIDS. Experimenting with media convergence enabled by the digital revolution and convergence as the cultural shift wrought by postmodern theories and tendencies, OR’s extremely minimal stage housed the maximum experimentation of electronic sound and lighting that defined two axes for its temporal and spatial structure. Second, it examines Dumb Type’s living legacy in its members’ work, taking Ryoji Ikeda’s work as specific example. I contend that, by embracing the technical facets and aesthetics of dumb type’s intermedia performance, Ikeda developed his own spatial expression meticulously coordinated with the temporal element to conjure the viewer’s spatio-temporal immersion to the datascape in his audiovisual work. My discussion underscores that Ikeda’s data composition unveils the temporal processuality of data processing at the threshold of the viewer’s perception and cognition, forging constantly transforming soundscape syncopated with light, graphic images, and data visualization at a precisely calibrated pace and intensity.