Lento-Presto (Corridor) Lento-Presto (Corridor)

Having studied art and space design, Lyota YAGI was influenced by ‘chance operation’, etc., producing works in a diverse range of genres including sound objets, text, video, installations, etc. All of his works are characterized by their ability to present a glimpse of the ‘reverse’ side or gaps in our perception by skillfully utilizing or transforming functions or parts of ‘readymades’. This work, in which images of the people passing the loudspeakers placed in the center of the corridor are projected at three different speeds, demonstrates that sounds that lie outside our audible range, can be ‘heard’ through the manipulation of video. ‘I thought that if I played the audio through the loudspeakers at high speed and captured the scene on video, then when played back in slow motion, the images would appear move slowly while the audio remained normal,’ it was with this anticipation that he began the work. In the scene entitled ‘a tempo (normal speed)’, people pass without paying any attention to the sound, but in ‘Lento (slow)’ the same scene is played back in slow motion and the ‘tune’ that was played on the speakers but which had been beyond our range of hearing, becomes clear. In the world where this tune can be heard, we appear to live our lives at a sluggish pace. The opposite is true in the scene entitled ‘Presto (fast)’. If we look at this world, where the tune is created by bass sounds that would normally be almost too low to hear, our daily lives appear to be as busy as ants. YAGI regards our world from a detached perspective, momentarily revealing ‘a viewpoint on a higher plane’, and hinting at possibilities that surpass the framework of perception in our world.