Neo Shibuya Project at Shibuya Station
Tokyo, Japan
NEO SHIBUYA TV is an art project launched by Shibuya Television that turns the district's advertising screens into a broadcast channel for artists. It uses eight large digital screens, covering the main streets around the Scramble Crossing in front of Shibuya Station, and dozens of smaller ones elsewhere in the neighbourhood, to show video works by visual artists and figures of street culture from Japan and abroad in place of commercial advertising.
Federico Clapis' work was broadcast as part of this programme. The footage of the screening shows one of his digital sculptures on the large screen framed in red under the Glico sign, carrying the Sib-tv mark, above the shops facing the Hachiko side of the crossing: a smooth, pale female figure in grey and pink tones who wears a virtual reality visor and curves her hands around an invisible object, with the artist's credit in the lower corner. Below the screen, commuters in face masks stream across the crossing, most of them walking past rather than stopping, which is the condition of this kind of public broadcast.
The presentation took Clapis' work out of the gallery and into one of the busiest pedestrian intersections in the world, where art competes for attention with the flow of the city. It fits a line in his path in which screens, networks and public space are part of the work's meaning, and it anticipates the large-screen and digital presentations that followed his move into crypto art.
Sources
- NEO SHIBUYA TV - The Art Project Redefining Billboards in Tokyo — Yokogao Magazine