Visual Brains (KAZAMA Sei + OTSU Hatsune) / digital / color / 30min. / 2017
The De-sign Series continues – producing the “Matiere of Memory Series” based on interviews with people who experienced World War II. This is our 9th installment. During the war many unreasonable laws were enacted which people had to abide by. Mrs.Chizuko Miura, who had her house torn down during the Air Defense Law’s Building Evacuation, was a student of Oin high school at that time. She worked for the Ministry of Education as a Scientific Research Assistant Technical Person in the Numerical Computation Department of Tokyo University. Because of the absolute secrecy of the military authorities, she did not know what her job entailed. Still a very impressionable grade school student, Mr. Taichi Yasuda was evacuated en masse from Saitama, Tokyo to the more rural region of Kyoto. He tasted the hostility of the world through this experience. Through recalling and tugging at their memories, they tell their stories. How at that time, they had to obey the forced and constrained directives of the country.
KAZAMA Sei and OTSU Hatsune formed Visual Brains and began to be active as visual artists when they were both working at a television production company called Teleforce. While creating multimedia art they also worked as directors on many projects in a variety of genres. Currently, she teaches at Tokyo Polytechnic University (OTSU). Recent written works include Gendai Eizou Geijyutsuron (KAZAMA, Shuppan Bunka Kenkyukai, 07).