We Japanese in particular live in high-density living spaces, spaces manipulated to the extreme like our miniature gardens with their trained bonsai trees. For someone living in such an environment, the image of a desert sets in motion a certain flight of fancy. I believe that the fantasy is an inverse reaction, an emotion springing out of our repressed desire for freedom and from our curiosity to see an environment different from our own.

Every time I visit the formal Japanese gardens in Kyoto, it strikes me that we place very heavy demands on spaces. Not just in the evocative, symbolic kare-sansui gardens of Ryuan-ji or the Daisen'in of Daitoku-ji, but in the so-called "natural" gardens in the kairo style, I feel the density and weight of the demands placed on space.

There is a certain perfection in the materials as well as their placement that I must applaud, but the more exacting the perfection, the more repressive the format appears to me.

If one views the entire city of Kyoto as an imitative miniature of Chinese capitals, one might conjecture that the city itself has a hidden longing for wide open spaces. To my imagination, the miniaturizing aesthetic characteristic of Kyoto is a converse manifestation of this longing.

Lee O-Young, one of the most brilliant intellectuals in modern Korea makes a similar interpretation in his work, "The Compact Culture - Smaller is Better." He conjectures that Kyoto has harbored an inferiority complex ever since the arrival of foreign cultures and that it is a transmutation of this complex that has caused its aesthetic sensibility to dwell in nooks and crannies, or in the minute.

To come back to deserts, the desert to me has a special emotional significance as a symbol of desire. The deserts of Africa that appeared in the biographies of Stanley or Livingstone that I read as a boy, the explorations of Sven Anders Hedin who crossed the Taklimakan Desert - these did more than whet my imagination. Although not a desert, I remember being similarly excited, even as a child, by accounts describing the vast white continent crossed by the English explorer Robert F. Scott as well as the Norwegian Roald Amundsen in their struggles to reach the south pole.

Just after the war, everyone in Aomori was poor, especially because so much had been destroyed in the air raids. My family was no different, and because the room where I sat engrossed in tales of vast continents was small and crowded and dimly lit, freedom became associated with images of wide open spaces.

Thinking back, the deserts of my imagination took on an exaggerated grandeur within a slightly simplistic paradigm. However, the seemingly inexhaustible power of nature represented by the desert and its relationship to human civilization remained a subconscious center of interest even in later years, when I read works such as "Aden, Arabie" by the French Philosopher Paul Nizan who exerted considerable influence on my thinking for a time and "Tristes Tropiques" by the cultural anthropologist Claude L�vi-Strauss which I also read as a youth.

The philosophical and anthropological significance of the works aside, I think that my interest was captured on a deep, subconscious level by the almost mind-numbing expanses of the torrid Middle East and the chaotic landscape of the tropics. If I add the works of Arthur Rimbaud and "The Stranger" by Albert Camus, I think I will have demonstrated amply that far from acquiring an elevated mentality from my childhood through my youth, I had grown up steeped in imaginative nostalgia. In other words, my intellectual development was quite ordinary and commonplace.

However, when I later re-examined these works I read during my unremarkable youth, it became apparent that the deserts which existed for me only as signifiers of psychological freedom were the stage for more corrupt struggles.

In the modern era, both political and cultural revitalization have been achieved through the exploitation of the less developed, by the expropriation of their cultures, lands or blood. It became clear to me that this was the latent scheme of world geopolitics. In addition, if we presume European civilization to be the foundation of an intellectual majority, history could also be understood as the continuous letting of the blood of less developed cultures.

It hardly needs to be said now that the ploy of revitalizing majorities through the discovery of minorities is a banality in modern geopolitics. This paradigm not only remains basically unchanged, but rather, I feel that it is expanding its hold on world affairs rather than the reverse. This may be an overstatement, but it appears to me that the deserts of the world are the stage on which the merchants of death ply their trades in the name of freedom.

Even so, I have cherished for a long time an unchanging desire to go to a desert. Like a child... And even now... What I would like to do is pull a sledge in the desert.

I first entertained this thought when I saw the sledge used by D. Geld�nu, a shaman of the Uilta tribe who passed away some years ago. It seemed to me that the sledge and its form were the coalescence of the memories of the Uilta from a bygone age when they could wander at will from Siberia to Sakhalin, living off the land. It was a symbol of a life without statehood or nationality.

I was also drawn to the sledge because of the mechanism of its form. Although a sledge is one of the most primitive methods of transporting people and goods, the form it had evolved had a beauty that could compare to the streamlined shapes of much more recent modes of transportation.

The image of walking in a desert with a sledge aroused my curiosity. How would a symbol of the north transform itself in a desert of the south? I was also interested in experiencing the intellectual confusion that was sure to arise when I transferred a distinct part of one culture into the environment of a totally different culture.

Of course, these thoughts are no more than metaphors. Intuition makes up 90% of the initial decision making concerning a performance. This is supported by 10% of staging which completes the work.

Performance begins to acquire form only through the process of decoding the sources of its force, its hidden forms, by deciphering its signs and their historical significance.

Although such an interpretation may seem belabored, this process is similar to an intuitive hunt for quarry, as a fisherman searches out schools of fish yet unseen from the color of the sea and the directions of the wind and currents. The feeling or impression I had when I first saw the sledge was similar to this.

The sign of the body

It hardly bears stating that I did not develop my image of drawing a sledge in the desert so that I could go to a desert with a sledge and trudge about playing at being a nomad.

The image is something of an inspirational force, a means of stimulating analysis of various phenomenon including myself. An image is also a sign which evokes countless words by association. The concepts of fixed habitations and nomadism are but one example. I have mulled over my approach to the idea of wandering as well as of exploration starting from the signifying image of "drawing a sledge in the desert."

The conceptual image also posed a question for my personal theory on media. That is, when one brings together the medium of the sand and of the sledge as well as of myself (my body), how would they react to each other within their various relationships?

I have a distinct impression that my being is sublated by my body which exists as a medium. That is, my body which is a sensory receptor is producing countless objects connected to the tips of my sensors as well as signs and verbal phenomena from the top of my brain. This condition might be described as a computerized self-awareness and this being as an electronic body or even a body constructed in a sensory mode.

Whatever the description, I think the consciousness that one's body is a medium is one of the definitions of modernity. In his theories on the "inorganic body," Jacques Derrida placed the construction of the body between the organic and its function as a medium, and regarded its very existence as that of a hollow agent sending and receiving information.

Expanding further on this idea, the body as a catalyst could be regarded as a medium for function as well as organic life. The function of cloning for the purpose of propagation might be considered in addition. Together, they could be related to the question of how these media are related to each other.

The concept of the body as medium has evolved greatly in the past ten years. However, even if we accept such theories of the body as media conductors and substitutes, the fact remains that our actual forms of conduct do not simply reflect simulations of general media.

Personal items such as movie and theater information and even stock market information have now found their way into the same video display terminals that we initially used for those early video games featuring invaders, using the same kind of system. Furthermore, by connecting the same machine to a telephone circuit, it can instantly serve as a computer terminal connected to any similarly connected machine in the world. Even without such examples, it is easier to understand these simulators as the organic promoters of the body's evolution.

To give another example, we are seeing the development of an age of high resolution television called "high vision." According to the promoters, we will in time be able to see images of scenery and artwork from all over the world that are close to the reality on wall-mounted televisions wherever we happen to live. Yet, however high resolution it may be, if one views it as embodying its own organic evolution, it is possible to see it as an extension of the substitute being.

This type of situation is no longer even strange or special. That is, we now live directly as media, and not in a comparative or metaphorical way.

We are placing our destinies at the mercy of speeds comparable to our brain circuits or even greater, speeds at which infinitesimal calculations are conducted in a single second. The futuristic culture of H. G. Well's "1984" is already here.

We might also compare it to the futuristic novel of Stanislaw Lem who depicted the future of computer chips in a story describing small insects living on another planet. They adopt various forms to fly through space, creating cities and imitating the form of humans. What I see around me corresponds perfectly to the setting described by Lem, sans the concepts of remorse and irony and a humanizing eroticism.

It is ironic that in today's computer language, a "bug" refers to a defect causing malfunctions. Lem certainly could not have had a premonition concerning such a detail although it is a curious agreement of negative signs. More than this, however, I am shocked to be actually living in this world of non-organic beings.

It is now a widely accepted idea that the body is a medium, a being that sends and receives signals. At the same time, another idea that has gained currency is the concept of the body as a catalyst. As proposed by even "classical" media theorists such as Marshal McLuhan, the body is not only a synthesizer of various media through the accumulation of information and selection of circuits, but also a "depository of genes, the means of transmitting life."

In its extreme form, this idea holds that as long as the body exists as genes or the pure propagative substances made from amino acids, it is possible for not only the human species but all life to propagate. To speak differentially, this concept could lead us finally to a situation where an ovum and sperm would guarantee the elementary continuation of the human species.

In this case, what corresponds to pure media are the ovum and sperm. It is not the biological will or the consciousness of the ovum and sperm that determine the future but their very existence, the condition of being reserved as the seeds of media. It is this consciousness that is important to the selections made for the future.

In other words, it is not the unique prerogative of human will or consciousness to desire succession. In simple terms, besides the succession of life caused by love or emotion or intellect, there exists a means for life to succeed itself by purely theoretical means, and this is self-evident.

This is only a hypothesis, but I could propose the following thesis in the event of the medium-ization of the body. That is, what exists to unite the two positions for asking the question "Who am I?"

Ihe question is posed by the being that propagates life but it can also be asked from the position of a theory of consciousness. The former is possible from a purely theoretical point of view. This is easy to see from scientific advances made in areas such as biotechnology which is being studied from various angles. If a method and technology were to be selected on the basis of some political or cultural illusion of the masses, the means could be considered to already exist.

It is apparent even without looking to past examples that if it were deemed socially necessary to promote the ideologies of cloning or of evolving one's progeny, it would be possible to begin even tomorrow. The question "Who am I?" from the being that propagates its species reminds me of an existence that places dominant genetic inheritance at the forefront of scientific media. In a sense, the self exists as an agent that throws doubt on pathos and professes trust in logos in this age of belief in science, having escaped from the gaze of the gods.

In comparison, the latter quest for who I am is extremely complicated. Basically, it is a relative and personal objection raised by man, born of pathos. There are as many quests as there are people and appear to arise from the self-referential search for the self within a theory of consciousness. Here, we see no common forms or framing of questions as we see in a scientific viewpoint. Even if we categorize them roughly, the answers must correspond to the question in terms of religion, politics nationality, race, environment, occupation and sex.

In other words, a human being is an animal that desires to be conscious and tries to be so by analyzing and sorting the information and knowledge it has been given or has acquired. It tries to do so on all levels of consciousness and within the complex combination of conditions that differ for each individual. Man is also a being with strong assimilative instincts who tries to overlap its personal experiences with the universal, through the behavioral patterns it has acquired from its desire to be a conscious being.

In a word, human beings are an animal that cannot live without proof of its own existence, and desires that something or someone guarantee its certificate of existence.

It is often said that this quest to discover who we are is a malady of the modern age. It is clear that the malady is deeply related to the structure of our various cultures and civilizations. Speaking metaphorically, modernity, the world we now inhabit, is the treatment for this disease.

In ages past, the question "Who am I?" was resolved by one's relationship to a god or to a king who ruled as his proxy. In the present day, electronic devices and computers have replaced gods and kings as the power which implies this relationship. In a sense, we have come to an age when we must rebuild the relationship between information and man.

It was Marshall McLuhan who said that computers are beautiful. Looking back, the 60's were a time for romanticism in our relationship to computers, much as many artists were fascinated by the mechanisms and the mechanical beauty of Fords and Porsches in the 20's. Computers used to be like electric robots: placed in huge rooms, they glowed bluish white with the light of countless electronic tubes.

We hardly need to see "2001: A Space Odyssey" again to remember that computers were full of a mechanical beauty that bordered on the nostalgic. However, this robot is now shrunken to one chip that does not even measure one centimeter wide. If anyone would like to see the computers of the past, I recommend the work of the French sculptor Takis in which you might see traces of its form. You could say that computers have virtually become the insects that Lem described. It is impossible to perceive beauty in them now, even if we tried.

This is a slightly different topic, but in recent years we have seen inquiries similar to those of the anal groupe pursued in various fields. At the risk of oversimplifying, I would describe them as investigations which are interdisciplinary but focus on events that are either almost insignificant or strange and heretical. Using methods such as moving the point of view to the periphery, they seek to define or understand through differentiation. Their investigations involve for example, constructing history in a different manner by replacing interpretive paradigms.

Such methods were exhaustively implemented only by a small group of ardent experimenters and artists but are now quite commonly accepted. The concept has been used in productions partly because it is a style that matches the intentions and tastes of the public, but it can also be viewed as a product of the age of informationalization.

The vast number of powerful information processing systems has dramatically raised the utility of heretofore scattered and random information, making it easier to retrieve related bits of information and delineating what used to be solitary items, giving them clearer definition on a variety of cultural levels.

From this vantage point, the constructions of the body politic in history have achieved a clarity unthinkable in the past. This has helped to popularize experiments such as those of the anal groupe. It is an amusing sort of irony that such attempts to assay the emotions of the populace and even delve into our cultural heresies have been aided in a way by computers and their high level processing capabilities.

The anal groupe movement aside, is has been believed until recently that information has a liberating effect. However, the theories of the media-ization of the body are always attended by doubt concerning the premise that the more information we possess, the greater the freedom we will enjoy. Or rather, this question occurs synonymously with the supposition that the media, to a large measure, are themselves in the process of evolving.

Concerning my own being, the body in performance and the body in daily life are not always synonymous, being bound by a double fiction. The ambiguity occurs because in performance as an expressive medium, the body is the physical being itself, and yet at the same time, it is unavoidable that I borrow on the general signifying quality of the body as a medium. Whether I draw the everyday into the sphere of performance or the other way around - one of which I eventually must do, the difference, as media, between the singular individual and the universal becomes apparent in performance.

The body in performance may be perceived as "the body" in physical form or as a phenomenon in which the physical being is turned into a medium. Although I understand both to be fundamentally related to concepts of the body in performance, the expression "the physical being as medium" is closer to my own sense of the situation than "the body as medium."

This is because the operative flexibility of performance poses the question not of whether information necessarily relates to the freedom of the individual but whether the concept of freedom exists within me, the manipulator of information. Performance is no more than a faint expression of my awareness that I have only happened to create a situation in which I have happened to elect freedom.

To my mind, freedom, rather than being the development of the being in its condition of being a medium, is a phenomenon that has the possibility of occurring in the ambiguous condition where the individual physical being is occupied or even supplanted by the "body as medium." On an individual, personal basis, it occurs within performance and as a physical incident.

I gave the title "Sledge and Bridge" to my plan of drawing a sledge in the desert. With the sledge standing for movement and the bridge for relationship, my sense of the title is to bring an old symbol of the culture of the northern hemisphere (where I also have my roots) to the southern hemisphere to bridge the two.

However, this type of explanation is actually only an afterthought. The truth is that I gave this work this title because I liked the way the words rhymed. Of course, both the sledge and bridge have images that could translate into a kind of work of sculpture, and I was greatly interested in the format of the installation I was going to attempt. This stimulated my creative sensibilities, but the kind of inspiration that leads to naming a work comes in a flash and does not bear explanation. It may be easier to explain this feeling as the coalescing and fitting of scattered thoughts and feelings in one place, like the moment a jigsaw puzzle is completed.

To find: 1) a desert of pure red sand or soil, 2) a forest of eucalyptus trees, 3) a creek or small body of water, 4) a riverbank and 5) a highway running through a desert. John Davis and Akio Makigawa pored over a map for days in order to locate an area with all of the above features.. During that time, I worked in a corner of Makigawa's studio to construct a structure about five meters long, inspired by the sledges of the Uilta.

I had not used a single nail for construction since I had heard from Geld�nu, shaman of the Uilta tribe, that no nails should be used to build a sledge. The reason nails cannot be used is that they will not withstand the bouncing and jolting caused by uneven terrain and obstacles on a long journey. Unless there is enough give so that the whole structure can sway slightly, it will break up when it hits something hard. You could say that it is similar to a building built with a flexible structure to withstand the movement of a possible earthquake. One indicator of "give" was whether the whole thing would sag slightly when it was held up by both ends.

I had decided on the five features above in order to include the basic structures of the landscape in the image I had in mind; I had not particularly chosen them as geographic features unique to Australia. The basic elements for my "location" were features you would probably see anywhere. What was important to me was what kind of reaction I would experience from the particular details of these general geographical features. This would be the interrelation of the locale and performance.

This is rather tangential, but there are times when I wonder if I am not seized by an obsession regarding the north, and this is not only while I was planning this project and doing the fieldwork. There is a force within me that attempts to measure the distance of all things from some imaginary point in the north and to respond according to the length and depth of this distance.

I wonder if this is because I grew up in an area geographically removed from the nation's center, a place that was historically and culturally peripheral. Or am I attempting to resist modernity by keeping the agnostic and shamanistic elements of my native north to the fore? This is all quite chaotic, but whatever the reason, I am always figuratively facing north as if I were a compass.

We reached the desert in Australia in the beginning of June. It was toward the end of fall and an Antarctic low pressure area was hanging over us, making the weather change every few hours.

We had driven about 400 km from Melbourne close to the border of New South Wales, in an area called the Barmah Forest. The large muddy Murray River ran nearby and beyond the wood was a dry, reddish desert . The flora of the wood disappeared at its edge and the desert stretched into the distance.

Our crew was made up of nine people in all. Besides myself, there were John Davis, Akio Makigawa, Tim Pie our video cameraman and his two assistants. We also had with us two students who were the kitchen crew and wireless operators. Finally there was Paula Dawson, a blond holography artist who was Tim Pie's fianc�e.

The Barmah Forest was completely covered with the thick, deep brown foliage of gigantic eucalyptus trees. Standing on the edge of the wood, you could see the bright red sands extending to the horizon. A highway ran straight down the red expanse as if it had been drawn with a ruler. The Murray River wended through the middle of the forest and in the evening hundreds of red parrots alighted near the bank, calling out with raucous voices that were a shocking contradiction to their beautiful plumage. Sometimes there were so many birds that they looked like a red cloud.

The desert in this area is a combination of small stones and sand with small, dry bushes that soften the landscape. It did not have the severity of the African desert I remembered from some ten years ago when I hitchhiked across northern Africa. Whereas the African sun blazed down from above and the desert reflected heat back from the ground, I felt that this desert had a melody as well as harmony.

The Australian desert might be described as a landscape reminiscent of the sound of the digeridoo played by the aborigines. Like the shakuhachi flute of Japan, its notes are long and like a soft wind. In contrast, I have to conclude that the tom-tom is the instrument that matches the desert of Africa.

The performance and fieldwork of "drawing a sledge in the desert" continued for five days. It was only a matter of moving from the forest to the creek, from the creek to the desert, then from the desert onto the highway, all drawing the sledge. In between, we also dug a small canal from one creek to another and crossed a small pool of water using the sledge as a bridge.

Between all this, we would take our meals, take a short stroll into the bush when nature called and spread out our map to find out where we were going next. You could say that there can be no performance more simple than this. It even became more like daily life rather than performance after a while.

Tim Pie recorded all of this and we planned to make his recording the work itself without any editing whatsoever.

When one engages in such monotonous activity day after day, one is often seized by the strange illusion that all time has come to a standstill. If you listen hard to time as it stands still, you can hear the faint sound of leaves as they fall and of insects walking and the strength and direction of the wind.

As these sounds naturally reach your ears, you begin to feel as though all of these natural phenomena have a consciousness of their own. You can imagine how a leaf must feel, wanting to fall. The faint breath of dead wood, breathing still although it has lain in the water of the creek for tens or hundreds of years, reaches you through the air.

I have read in an article somewhere that the American composer John Cage refers to the instant he meets up with a sound as "a meeting of each other's consciousness." The forest teaches you that this is not a simile or figurative description. I have a firm conviction that all things have a consciousness. In the forest, one realizes that we are unable to sense the will or consciousness of other living things because we are so engrossed in the consciousness of other people.

Performance is quite a usefull thing after all. It even has the same effect as an ascetic practise like Zen Buddhism. This latter comment is meant in jest, but it is clear that one sometimes has mysterious experiences in the course of a performance.

The performance in the desert that I had dreamed of for so long was finally over. The time passed almost too uneventfully and my dream came true without great exertion or drama.

I had longed to stand in the desert. Once I had accomplished this, it was almost disappointing Considered as a performance, it felt almost as if I had taken a short journey in which we elected to live a performance-like life, rather than as if I had realized a performance.

Yet, this kind of field work demonstrated that performing and living, though related, are different. Perhpas not so different in nature, but distant. Performance informs us that the distance between the gaze and the experience reflected in a gaze is far, very far.