袖岡由英
13-compositions #10
gif

source:sodeokacom
Yoshi Sodeoka is an artist based in New York for over two decades, whose work is characterised by his neo-psychedelic aesthetic and exploration of multiple media and platforms. Primarily comprising of video, GIFs and print his practice also simultaneously inhabits the world of fine art, music, publications, and advertising.

Sodeoka’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Centre Pompidou, Tate Britain, Museum of Modern Art, Deitch Projects, La Gaîté lyrique, Channel 4 Random Acts UK, Baltimore Museum of Art, OneDotZero, Sonar Festival, Transmediale, Whitney Museum of America’s Art Artport. His artworks are in the permanent collections of Museum of the Moving Image as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2013, Sodeoka co-founded the experimental video art collective, Undervolt & Co. He has collaborated with bands like Psychic TV, Tame Impala, Yeasayer, Beck, The Presets, has created art prints for New York Times, Wired Magazine, San Francisco Magazine, Entertainment Weekly and has produced advertising work for brands such as Apple, Samsung and Nike.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source:artsynet
New York-based digital video artist Yoshi Sodeoka draws from his background in and love of music to inspire his psychedelic prints and animations. Noise, punk, and metal bands have influenced his visual practice in the past; more recently, progressive rock music has been the muse for his complexly structured, abstract imagery. Sodeoka often collaborates on the audio soundscapes for his works, and samples from found footage and imagery online to produce his surreal videos. Of his psychedelic style, Sodeoka says, “For me, it’s about making mind-altering hypnotizing visuals with no weird chemicals involved.”
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source:redefinemagcom
New York City-based video artist Yoshihide Sodeoka is known for his disquieting psychedelic videos, which are characterized by saturated colors, mythological references and a tense expression of time. Working often on an intuitive level, Sodeoka often allows his audio-visual creations to assume their shapes through a combination of spontaneous assemblage and aesthetic choreography. His video art is unique for its translation of noise music into a visual language, and for the close relationship of his moving imagery to principles of stillness. Polarizing aesthetics and themes in particular lend a spiritual tendency to the artist’s work — though not overtly, and perhaps not even consciously — yet the fine line between good and evil is channeled into intense representations of such duality through the artist’s imagery. This symbolically rich language is revealed through Sodeoka’s manipulation of the characteristics of distortion and his play with fragmented forms; a fantastical exploration of imperfection in his imagery works in contrast to the sterility of technology.

Influenced by glitch, though not fixated on allowing the process to define his aesthetic, Sodeoka primarily uses the more ambient elements of computer-generated imagery. These aspects are most often expressed as spatial perspective, orientation, duration, and color. By combining glitch with the intentionality of his mythological composition, Sodeoka amplifies the ambiance, presence of error, and minimal gesturing which challenge linear narrative structures.

“Any computer-generated imageries tend to look cold when they are perfectly executed. But I just like things that are imperfect and decayed in general. So, I mix errors and dirt into my artworks to give it a little human touch. But I’m not sure if I ever use the term “glitch” to describe my work, and it’s never my central theme. I always put many other different elements such as scanned dirty iPad screen with fingerprints or analog feedback, things that are old and analog.The thing is that the concept of glitch is nothing new. Just try to think of distorted guitar sounds in rock music as an example. Distortion sound was originally a glitch that people try to eliminate when electric guitars came around. But it’s like one of the most natural sounds in pop/rock music since 1950’s. No one calls music with distorted guitar sounds glitch music, right? Technology fails and do a lot of cool things for artists that are originally unintended by the inventors. No big deal.

What’s important is the right combination between ideas and techniques to make things interesting. It’s always important to think before using those techniques and looks and figure out why they add meanings for my ideas. If not, I just leave those out of it. And as for the end result, the artwork is most successful when people don’t pay attention about the use of glitch or any other technical things and just focus on the message itself.”

Manipulating Audio-Visual Perception
A symbiotic relationship between the aural and the visual experiences of sound can often be seen in Sodeoka’s videos. From the minimalist white static and pulse-lines of Aditi (2005) to the electric vortex of Disc: Void (2009), and the more recent object-oriented visuals of the ongoing Sibyl series, Sodeoka reveals an experimental tendency towards the ways in which images can express sonic elements: how they can reflect one another aesthetically and also in a more visceral, experiential sense.

The aesthetic parallels play with the distinction between simplistic geometric shapes and complex, layered visualizations; both often rely on interlacing light to assail the viewer. The visualization of the sonic experience can also be found in Sodeoka’s rhythmic multiplication of objects within an otherwise still frame, and in the alternately sustained or jittering movements of this miscellany in response to recorded sound. This accompanying musical component is a primary element in Sodeoka’s work, as opposed to being an incidental addition onto the visuals.

The high-voltage shock of Bloodless, Empty Socket, for instance, exemplifies Sodeoka’s compression of bleeding color and image so that the undulating electronic sounds seem to direct the visuals. As the screen flares up into quickened heartbeats of venous blue and arterial red, a low reverb seems to circle inwards. Against the abstraction, images are revealed in a subliminal volley of detonations, Illuminati symbolism, and barely decipherable suggestions of a world that exists between the eye and the digital sphere of computer and television screens. Striations of colour, visions of laced acid, struggle into view as the oscillating sounds of Bloodless, Empty Socket evoke alien voices, flickering channels, and finally, photographic evidence of the human gaze. As an X-ray skull blinks across the image, the soundtrack makes fleeting reference to musical organization and harmony. Sodeoka’s visualizations gasp for clarity in the same pattern as the rise and fall, fade and emergence of the sound. In its own harmony with the conclusive drone, the turbulence comes to rest in the form of an electric orb–an all-seeing eye, an inhuman gaze, vacuous and overwhelming.

Sodeoka’s videos may at times appear deceptively simple — almost child’s play with their shimmering orbs, splashes of watercoloured pixels and gleaming lines that appear to indiscriminately cut through the frames. An initial glance at the video Universe / Calibration divulges not much more than an inexplicable ring hovering in a stream of fluorescent clouds. There appears to be no narrative, yet Sodeoka manipulates the quizzical, eerie qualities of psych visuals to, again, create a spatial experience where the video’s sound defines the progress in the viewer’s approach toward the object.

Divested even from the interpretive potential of the accompanying Sibyl videos, Universe / Calibration relies on musical tropes to express a self-containing symbolism through the choice of vocals and wooden instruments. Sodeoka assigns significance to his objects with sonic allusions to ritual and awe, worship and incantation. The meditative quality of Universe / Calibration allows Sodeoka to create a video of mystical development with an absolute minimum of event. A synchronization of stuttering light and sound further implies the potential ominous role of the hovering circle, or perhaps the disbelief of the approaching viewer; magical qualities are imagined by the increasing urgency and interruptions of the soundtrack — and yet, Sodeoka’s video contains no such nuanced narrative that can be taken independently of this development in the sound. The representational simplicity in Sodeoka’s visuals is more often a method to explore these relationships between moving images and sounds, from within the artist’s preferred psychedelic aesthetic.

The cross-pollination of visual and sonic elements in Sodeoka’s work often responds to the role that technology has in creating cultural artifacts. While not aggressive in exploring this discourse, the scope of Sodeoka’s projects includes questions on how the technical execution of animated videos can manipulate a viewer’s connection to the significance of the original content, as well as how tense distortion can amplify expression in even the most abstracted works.

Discourse around the role of technology in the preservation of memory—be it of an explicitly historic, personal or artistic context—is present in some of Sodeoka’s earlier work. In an interview with Triangulation, Sodeoka explains that his visual work derives from elements that are unique to computers. One such tendency is his use of RGB color schemes of a computer, which are created by artificial lights and are not experienced in the same way through natural vision. In his audio work, he exploits the corruptible nature of technology for aesthetic and conceptual purposes, creating the potential for meaning in the both the original content and the processed disruption.

The recent collaborative Algo-Rhythms exhibition at Sonos Studio (NYC) featured Yoshi Sodeoka’s animation ASCII ROCK, which is one half of a mini-series that is completed by ASCII BUSH. The Sonos exhibition was curated around the exploration of perceptual and participatory aspects of sound, including the ways in which sound can be experienced visually. While a large part of Sodeoka’s videos do explore this relationship, it is equally important to consider the social commentary that is subtly expressed by the artist in the ASCII series. In ASCII ROCK, Sodeoka made use of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)–generally seen as a combination of the letters, numbers and symbols on a computer keyboard, but with a long history of being used for more complex imageries. ASCII BUSH, which was not featured at Sonos, presents a broken audio version of two speeches delivered by George W. Bush in 2003 and George H. W. Bush Sr. in 1991–significant historic artifacts that preserve fragments of a destructive agenda, of aggressive political motivations.