Tokyo: The Attention Deficit Capital
As a city, Tokyo’s mind wanders.
It’s attracted to shiny things. It has trouble focusing on one thing. Which makes it a dynamically shifting visual wonderland.
Tokyo’s fashion sense drifts and changes course on a whim. You see a shirt you like, and you better gobble it up, cause when you head back to the shop a few days later, the contents (and often actual store design) will have changed completely.
There is no Tokyo Summer 2009 collection. Storefronts swap out on a weekly basis. Each week brings in a new fashion season. Occasionally one of the big, international brands will keep things up for a month. But after a couple weeks you start to hear rumblings from the locals that they have gone stale and are no longer innovative. Danger zone.
Walk in to most clubs and you’ll be assaulted with projected images that flicker at more than 120 frames a minute. If MTV, and the rise of music videos decimated our visual attention span by increasing the average cut rate to once every three seconds, what is this kind of Tokyo visual flickering doing to us?
If an image can’t even be fresh enough to stay embedded on the wall for a full second, what is going on?
Is there still a strength in the lasting power of the individual iconic image?
Is there a singular poster that could stand as a visual anthem for this city? I think it would have to be a multimedia poster, that involved lasers, mirrors, a fog machine, a disco-ball, techno music, and it would change the shirt it’s wearing every few seconds. Hmmm, I guess there is not one singular poster we could make.
It’s the embrace of the ANTI-TREND. What little thing can you do that no one else is doing? Wrap your left arm in tinfoil. Wear your socks inside out and pop them on the outside of your pants, or wear short pants so people notice. Graft three bills onto one hat. You name it, and someone hear is trying it.
I felt weird the other day, when in a city of tens of million, I saw two people wearing the same shirt, with the same blurred image of Pac-Man. Usually, everyday consists of walking by thousands of uniquely different graphic textiles.
The only visual trends I recognize are when a new store opens, take, Forever 21 for example. The streets will be taken over by a marching army of high school girls all toting the same bright yellow bag from the store. But that’s it. The city won’t decide, can’t decide on anything beyond that. Shopping is the ever trend. Some call it art. I’m not drinking that kind of kool aid.
Shopping will never be art. The people who create the fashion, the designs, are artists. The people who consume, and decide to buy them are curators. They are art collectors to a degree. But unless they are creating an output of their own, commerce is not a creative act. It is just feeding the frenzy of the collective attention deficit of the city.
I like the scattered attention, because when I walk the city, I feel like I’m experiencing a visual playlist set on shuffle. I never know what will pop up, but I know it will have some style and thought behind it. I find it inspiring. I always carry a notebook because coming across these random things, these shifting things, sparks ideas that I want to carry out.
Browsing and sampling is fine, just as long as the shiny things don’t suck you in and make you forget your personal creative mission.
It is a neon Alice in Wonderland tunnel that can consume and take you as its own.
Be true to your school.







