Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Six: Chapter Nine: Relative Movement
The installation Japanese Commuter Train (Nippon no tsûkin kaisoku), which media artist Tabaimo first presented in 2001 at the Yokohama Triennale, offers a beautiful example of relative movement.
The two cars of the commuter train are drawn in accordance with one-point perspective, and cityscapes stream past the train windows on either side. The two streams of cityscape appear to converge on a vanishing point somewhere beyond the train. Yet the installation does not impart a sense of movement into depth. The effect is one of sliding layers, and a form of animetism dominates our sense of movement. It gives a sensation of induced movement or relative movement. We are in a stationary car that feels like it is moving only because images are moving past the windows. The effect can be somewhat dizzying because we alternately feel that the car is moving and that the city is moving.
The very flat style of drawing, which comes of Tabaimo’s interest in manga, heightens our perceptual uncertainty about what is moving, because the foreground and background layer are equally flat, which ‘relativizes’ their relation. Neither one seems deeper and thus more salient or important than the other.
