Design Festa 2008

Design Festa, 17th - 18th May 2008, Tokyo. Apparently, *THE* biggest art and design show in Asia. We had bought our advance tickets from a local Lawsons (a convenience store) and went down to Odaiba [お台場] on Sunday morning.

We approached Tokyo Big Sight by the most expensive line in Tokyo called the Yurikamome [ゆりかもめ] (well... that's what we used to complain that it was when I lived on the reclaimed bit of sea which can only really be reached by this line...) symbolised by a little seagull (a kamome) - 10 or 15 years ago none of this used to exist...it was just a conveniently shallow bit of sea, that Tokyo absorbed because it has run out of space to expand inland, due to the surrounding mountains...and anyway they've been doing land reclamation for centuries, back when they just used to ram huge beams of wood into shallow sea water...and repeatedly dump sand and material, until they could walk on it...then build on it...Techniques have advanced a little since then... I have been told that the material used to 'reclaim' (not that it really belonged to humans anyway) the land, was mainly taken from metro and trainline tunnelling projects. Reducing the need to waste lots of energy transporting loads of sand pointlessly around the country. ANYWAY...I get distracted by the engineering...as you can probably see, Tokyo Big Sight is a strangely shaped building... looks like four upside-down pyramids on pillars. The entire complex spans much further off into the distance up to about 2 stories in height in what seem like HUGE event spaces. It is damned impressive when you walk through it after a series of lectures or meetings finish... it looks like some kind of human-making-factory (might have mentioned this before...hmmm then again, maybe not...did mention the building here though). There are several other equally strange looking buildings in Odaiba - namely the Fuji Television Building.

I really don't know what the humongous saw is there for...It was one of the first impressions of Tokyo that I received...

There was quite a queue of people, and we had gotten there EARLY! The thing opened at 11am and there was a line of people waiting...Mind you, it doesn't even come close to the mob that we saw when there was a anime and manga event here a year ago. The horde of people (mainly males...) stretched back to the train station about 8 people wide...and the train station is about 600m away... Our little speck of a queue was nothing compared to that one...none the less, as we saw most people head straight for the first floor, we decided that it might be nicer to go straight to the second floor, where we were hoping it would be quieter.

We walked into 'West 3' and it was rather dark. the other half of the hall was properly lit, I guess this side was in darkness to allow people to see the video projection which was aimed at one of the walls. Ignoring this there was some great art work hiding in the dark...Unfortunately, the DARK meant we couldn't get a good photo of this stall, but this lady (Monchi Hoshi) - who can be found here...and her shop here...- had amazing artwork, a kind of meld of the the bold and crisp forms of art deco and the oriental. Original designs seemed to be printed on cloth for hanging and smaller items, like bags. She also had a couple of beautifully etched and stained mirrors on show.

One guy had built a city out of card board, placing little lights and lots of detail through out the mini installation, drawing you deeper and deeper into the miniature world he had created.

There was a little store FULL of tiny frogs, in dispersed with the odd tadpole and a duude mixing music with the sounds of a game boy.... Here you can see he's hooked up three of the things to his mixer. The sound he made was great to listen to too, and drew him quite an admirable crowd.

After 2 hours we had managed to make our way through half of the second of two floors of the festa. We stopped for lunch at one of the food stalls...and then after a short break, we soldiered on to the rest of 'West 4' and eventually made it down stairs to 'West 1 and 2'...which we whizzed through.

The guy above sketching, was drawing with silver pen on black paper, using a similar idea to fractals... each chunk of art work that he had (there were three that we could see) was a magnified section of one of the other drawings. Some of the lettering was written in mirror form, some had meaning, some other writings had no meaning. He was very friendly, and Greg managed to have a nice little chat with him...

One guy filled his stall with one huge canvas/drawing board, and was just sketching through out the show, everything in pencil. The great thing with the whole show was that many of the stall holders had personalised their stalls by painting and sketching on the screens that separated them from their neighbours.

There were also some super-heroes wondering around...but I couldn't work out why.

I leave you with a picture of one of the many stalls which sold mini postcard versions of their artwork....