Taka Iimura "Video installation Talking to myself"

‘Taka Iimura is a maker of film and video work. One of the aspects of his video activities is to express his interest in the structural relationship between language and image in a highly personal way. 'Video is a unique system for studying this problem because image and sound are registered simultaneously. In the closed circuit system, the video camera (the observer) gets feedback from the monitor (the observed), by which the image refers not only to the registered object but also to that which is doing the registering. This corresponds with the structure of a sentence. As far as language is concerned, I am interested in sentence structure and not on the word as object. Within the video medium I have attempted to involve the observer - ‘I’ (being the subject) - as an integral part of the system and of the linguistic sentence in the image-language relationship. [...] The relationship of the observer and the observed is the ‘I’ and ‘you’ in language: that is, in the sense of ‘I see you’.' (Art, artists and the media, Graz 1978). ‘Between 1974 and 1977 Iimura developed various videotapes and video installations on this basic principle. The video installation he will be showing on 19 March is developed from another phenomenological principle. Iimura got the idea while reading a sentence by Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, in 'Speech and Phenomena' (translated by David B. Allison): 'When I talk, I hear myself at the same time. This phenomenon is part of the phenomenological essence of this deed'. Taka Iimura himself will be present and is eager to discuss his work.’ (Invitation De Appel, February/March, 1980.)