The Recognition Construction №XIII, Variation’85

Overview

This U-matic video incorporates a number of frequent images from Wada's oeuvre: a camera advancing down a colonnaded pedestrian walkway beneath an elevated train line, the figure of a woman with her back to the camera retreating down a street toward a vanishing point by walking or running, and various seascapes. These scenes are spliced together in seemingly random order, sometimes inserted into each other or reshot through close-ups of video monitors. At times the footage is so heavily mediated and re-mediated that images blur into shadow and light, disappear into CRT phosphor dots, or shift hues and patterns from oversaturation and noise. A soundtrack by Hideki Yoshida accompanies the entire sequence, featuring echoing electronic patterns and long tones interspersed with ambient sounds of traffic and beachfront waves. This work was first screened at the Worldwide Video Festival in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Netherlands, in 1986.