“What is a mountain? What is a volcano? Who governs an Empire?”
On the dark gallery walls, red dots flash, becoming denser and more concentrated until they form recognizable English words — before the laser beams dissipate again into blurred lines. In the background of this ticker tape of cryptic meditations, a gentle murmur of found sound floats through the room. This installation by Dumb Type, now on view at the Artizon Museum in Chuo City, Tokyo, seems to hum with vaguely futuristic mechanics. But like the laser beams aimed at the wall, it only very occasionally crystallizes into meaning before flitting away.
The art collective Dumb Type was founded in 1984 and has a shifting membership of collaborators, which most recently added Ryuichi Sakamoto to its ranks. Together, the avant-garde art group and musician created a new work called “2022” for last year’s Venice Biennale. This and two other recent Dumb Type works have been recreated in Tokyo and adapted for the museum as “2022: remap,” where it will be on view from Feb. 25 through May 14. But even for this high-concept collective, some of the works are especially hard to grasp. And it seems that the displacement of the works is partially to blame.