Hakudō Kobayashi

Hakudō Kobayashi (小林はくどう, Kobayashi Hakudō; July 2, 1944) is a Tokyo-based artist working in video and sculpture. He is best known for his work as a promoter of citizen video work. Kobayashi is also Representative Director of the NPO Shimin ga Tsukuru TVF (Community-made TVF) which runs the annual Tokyo Video Festival. He taught at Seian University of Art and Design from 1992-2010.
Biography.
Kobayashi was born Kobayashi Hiromichi (an alternate reading of the characters in his name) in Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan in 1944. He moved to Tokyo to attend Tama Art University, graduating from the Department of Oil Painting under Yoshihige Saitō in 1967.
In the leadup to Expo ‘70, Kobayashi worked with Goji Hamada, Kazuo Kawasumi, Masanobu Yoshimura, Yasuharu Yukino, and Tanaka Norio as the design firm Kantsū (Penetration), which produced the ABAB Akafudado store in Ueno, and a collaborative project at Expo ’70, among other projects. Kobayashi and Kantsū also worked as part of Masanobu Yoshimura’s team producing ravens and other objects for the Textiles Pavilion at Expo ’70.
After picking up the medium of video in 1972, Kobayashi first taught video for the Yokohama-based alternative art academy B-Zemi starting in 1973. From 1975 he taught at Tama Gakuen College of the Arts (Tama Geijutsu Gakuen), and a series of other schools until joining the faculty of Seian University of Art and Design in 1992, where he stayed until 2010.
From the late 1970s on, Kobayashi was also involved in various initiatives, festivals, publications, and programming promoting citizen video, community video, and amateur video. Since 1979 he has worked in various capacities with the annual Tokyo Video Festival, under the aegis of Japan Victor from 1979-2009, and then under the NPO Shimin ga Tsukuru TVF (Community-made TVF) since 2010. Kobayashi is currently the Representative Director of NPO Shimin ga Tsukuru TVF.
Artistic Activities.
Kobayashi first gained attention for his "Hakudo Machine" series: mobile reliefs, sculptures, and installations draped in fabric, animated by simple gears, chains, and motors. The series, which ran from 1967-70, was included in the 1969 "Trends in Contemporary Art" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto and outside the Mitsui Pavilion at Osaka’s Expo ‘70.
Kobayashi was a founding member, alongside Fujiko Nakaya and Yūji Morioka, of Experiments in Art and Technology Tokyo (est. 1971), a branch of the international collective founded in New York by Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Whitman. Their first project was the Tokyo branch of "Utopia Q&amp;A, 1981", a telex network that connected nodes in New York, Stockholm, Ahmedabad, and Tokyo as part of the Moderna Museet’s "Utopias &amp; Visions" "1871-1981" organized by Pontus Hultén. The Tokyo branch of the project was presented at the Xerox Knowledge-In, Sony Building, Ginza from July 30-September 30, 1971. It was organized as a kind of quasi-newsroom that would display incoming and outgoing telex messages from the other nodes of the project and served as a base of operations for daily translations of messages between English (the language used at the other site) and Japanese. Kobayashi and the other organizers also reached out to different local intellectuals and media figures to solicit questions and answers for the project.
From February 1972 through its dissolution in 1975, Kobayashi joined Nakaya, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Rikurō Miyai, Masao Kōmura, Michitaka Nakahara, Kyoko Michishita, Shoko Matsushita, Sakumi Hagiwara, Toshio Matsumoto, and others in activities under the collective name of Video Hiroba. Kobayashi was one of the core members of the group, and participated in their major exhibitions and community projects including "Video Communication: Do-It-Yourself-Kit" (1972, Sony Building, Ginza), "Video Week: Open Retina—Grab Your Image" (1972, American Center, Nagata-cho), "Tokyo-New York Video Express" (1974, Tenjo Sajiki Theater, Shibuya), the "Karuizawa Video Game Festival" (1974, Karuizawa, Japan), the "Research for New and Existing Residents’ Participation" (1973, Sakuragi-cho and Noge-cho, Yokohama), and the Video Community Center project at Tohoku Electric Power Company’s Niigata branch office (1973). Kobayashi further supported the production of other works by Fujiko Nakaya, helping her record her 1972 video "Friends of Minamata Victims—Video Diary" and serving as part of a team that recorded videos for her 1973 project "Old People’s Wisdom—Cultural DNA".
Kobayashi’s individual works tend to fall into two categories: media animations or sequential video feedback performances. His media animations, such as "Earth" (1974), subject still or moving images to mediation by synthesizers such as the Scanimate at IMAGICA Ltd. His sequential video feedback performances involve re-recording practices, sometimes with individuals performing next to monitors featuring videos he has previously recorded of other performances to create a mise-en-abyme effect, and sometimes with compilations of individuals who attempt to recreate previous footage in the compilation sequence through performance. Such works include "Catch Video" (1975), "Play/Catch Video" (1975), "Lapse Communication" (1972-1980), and "Aqua Works" (1975-78, 2015).
Community Video Activism.
Since his days in Video Hiroba, community collaboration and promotion of citizen video have been central to Kobayashi's practice. In 1978 Kobayashi moved to the city of Kunitachi in the western suburbs of Tokyo. He was contracted by the city of Kunitachi to produce a series of videos, using equipment provided by the city, that would be used as a means of promoting critical discussion and debates around issues of local interest. According to the organizers of the 2005 NTT InterCommunication Center exhibition "Possible Futures: Japanese Postwar Art and Technology", the project was aimed at “utilizing video as a medium for ‘publicizing’ the opinions of citizens rather than a medium for government ‘public relations,’ so it can be said that it was an attempt to destroy the hierarchical structure between those who are in a position to voice their opinions and those who are not.” The Tokyo Video Festival, which Kobayashi has contributed to in different roles over the years, including as a judge and as the current Representative Director, similarly places videos by amateurs alongside professionals in an international competition that includes shorts, feature films, documentaries, and fiction. From the late 1970s, Kobayashi produced various publications aimed at generalist, amateur, and youth audiences, including publications for NHK, the weekend edition of the Nikkei Newspaper ("Nikkei Shimbun"), and the children’s book publisher Librio Publishing ("Riburio Shuppan").