Hyperart Thomasson, the album
I have been taking a mild hiatus from doing these little therapeutic (for me, anyway!) columns, in order to balance this with some other creative campaigns. And now, amazingly, this has borne fruit in the form of my first ever 'epic-length' album (almost a full hour of oneiric music). This is probably my most complete / representative work in that field, and will either be my swan song or the herald of something completely new. Specially hi-quality .pdf book w/ images and liner notes included for those who purchase the current digital version (and any funds accumulated from that version will go to finance a “physical” version, so-called, for those who still swear by them).
Hyperart Thomasson, both the name of this irregular column and of the new set of recordings, is an “art movement” conceptualized by eclectic cultural engineer Genpei Akasegawa, and based upon the aestheticization of “useless” man-made structures and landscapes. In Akasegawa’s estimation: “art is actually a utilitarian thing that serves a purpose...Hyperart, on the other hand, doesn’t even serve an artistic purpose. It serves none of the myriad purposes that a thing can serve in life.”
Thomasson was in fact the surname of an American baseball player brought to the Japanese major leagues as a ‘designated hitter’: while highly touted in the beginning, his subpar output eventually led to his being benched during most of his debut season, while he earned derisive nicknames like “the electric fan” for his propensity to swing at the air rather than delivering a steady stream of base hits.
Parallels could of course be drawn between the failure of a baseball player’s career and the failure of architectural features to rise to any kind of utility: the more notable examples of “Thomasson” (alternately Tomason or トーマソン) include staircases leading up to solid walls, so-called “pure tunnels” no greater in length than a single car on a passenger train, and other humorous forms that seem to have arisen of their own free will rather than as the result of any considered “urban planning”. Another interesting fact arose from Akasegawa’s observation and cataloging of these “hyper-objects”: in spite of their uselessness, most or all of these seemed to be “beautifully preserved.”
I’ve taken the liberty of fusing my own given name with the name of this movement, as I feel that the study of - and paradoxical valuation of - uselessness has been one of the main planks of my creative program over the past two decades. “Uselessness” and the lack of public interest in things designated as such may become, in the present world, the key to much greater personal freedom, particularly as we see the pathologies that result from constant attention and digital monitoring of behavior. It will become more and more imperative to create without expectation of attention and certainly without deliberately courting the same.