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| transcript : | Are your sequences of numbers calculated mathematically? |
| Tatsuo Miyajima : | No. No mathematical logic is involved, beyond the infinite play within one to nine and the idea of one people. Time is inside. There are two senses to this. One is to count up from one to nine. The other is to count down in the opposite direction. Neither includes zero. Both repeat. |
| t : | What other forms of logic generate the numbers? |
| M : | The logic of random selection, IC (Integrated Circuit) chips produce the numbers in randomly selected sequences. I choose the timing and I specify how many LED devices are linked together. They appear to be calculated logically because ‘surely’, we think, ‘there must be a logic’. But they are calculated illogically. And so we might try not to impose a logic on them. |
| t : | Do you think, as quantum cosmologists Hawking, Hartle and Gell-Mann seem to do(3), that chaos is calculable? |
| M : |
Chaos is capable of so much… Some physicists try to calculate chaos only to find that it is impossible to reach or to imagine. |
| t : | Language is difficult when thinking about time. It seems even more imprecise and slippery than usual… |
| M : |
Time. It is simple, really. It is like air. If we try to grasp air, there is nothing. Some images, some particular works of art, helps us to think about time. We do not need to understand time, although we think that we do. But we are living it. |
| t : | We are doing time? |
| M : | Yes, doing time by living it. |
| t : | You spoke earlier about the whole being made up of all its parts. Does your interest in Buddhism include the way in which different bodies of knowledge seem to converge at different points in time and space? I am thinking here, in relation to your work, of cosmology, optoelectronics, mathematics, meteorology, quantum physics - art. |
| M : |
The timescale in Buddhism is infinite. Things come together and then divide. New things come into being. One of the Buddhist texts, Lotus Sutra, offers an important example of time and space imagining. There is one story about 500 jntengo. What is referred to in this story is past measuring and no-one can fully imagine it because it is unthinkable. One jntengo is a crashed universe. It crashes and what is left is a countless number of grains of dust. From each grain of dust a new universe forms. This is the story on one jntengo and there are five hundred jntengo. And history repeats itself over time. There is also a way of thinking within Buddhism which has a time meaning without a tense. It does not acknowledge a time of the present or the future or the past. It then becomes easier to accept that incalculable numbers might exist in such a definition of time. If you can imagine Buddhist time…it connects with everything which is at the heart of your question. |
| t : | Can you expand on your recent adoption of Marie-Louise von Franz’s symbolic allusion(4) that time is expressed in Western Europe as a snake, in East Asia as a dragon, in America as a twin-headed serpent? |
| M : | When I made the spiral work I was aware that in western culture time is linear, but in Eastern culture the emphasis is on a spiral form as a way of representing time. The spiral work makes reference to the twin-headed serpent. I kept in mind the idea of a ‘time father’ who has a serpent entwisted around his body – time here is not linear but flows backwards as well as forwards., the spiral is also suggestive of a chain formation. To me there is a connection with other life chains, such as DNA, the dragon, in a way, symbolises the time of the universe – god of the whole. |
| t : | Your audience needs to work at these associations? |
| M : | Yes, I prefer to articulate visually, rather than explain verbally. This has always been the case. A painting by Giotto, for example, worked according to this principle – and still does. |
| t : | Does your work reflect the idea that time is a regulating principle of the human condition, and also an organising principle within the human corporeal being? This is a question about the relationship between inside and outside for people…for objects. |
| M : | There is no outside or inside time. Everyone has their own condition, their own motion, their own time. That means that time cannot exist without human intelligence and art cannot exist without an audience. Art and time come from people. |
| t : |
Could you say something about your Mondrian pieces? Mondrian linked abstraction, beyond Modernist formalism, to spiritual values. Why did you connect your work with Mondrian’s? |
| M : | I was interested in Mondrian’s preoccupation with dynamism, and struck by the static quality of his chosen medium. I wanted to bring movement to bear, in the form of a connected piece, to some of Mondrian’s works. |
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