In its experiencial barrage, Tokyo challenges us to reconsider the relationship between architecture and media. The ubiquity of the sign in the city is not new, but signs in Tokyo are often not fixed increments of information, but screens available for complex and strategic programming. The digital screen in Tokyo is nearly constant, from the scale of the human hand to the largest urban spaces. This is of course, just one form of media in the space of this city, and it is the offcast of this sensorial density that produces much of the texture of daily life.
The experience of moving through Tokyo inherently confronts each of us with phenomena, both virtual and real, of radically different dimensions. At the most simplistic level we are often cast from the corporate - with its monolithic pomposity and self consious patriarchal hauteur to the rude expedience of the vernacular city. Of course even as the scale of media, infrastructure and building changes, the dimension of the human subject remains stable.
George Wagner
Tokyo 2004