Tactile Renga
is a series of Renga artworks created by three
artists; Takayuki Mitsushima and Rieko Nakamura + Toshihiro Anzai.
Takayuki Mitsushima is a visually impaired artist who explores tangible
paintings using adhesive tapes (LetraLine) and sheets as the medium.
Nakamura and Anzai are artists internationally recognized for
"Renga" since 1992. Renga is an experimental art project to
explore the new possibility in collaborative art form employing digital
technology. In Renga a digital painting is sent over the network to the
other artist where the image will be modified to become a different
artwork, which will be sent back for the next step. Based on Japanese
tradition of literature, Renga explores a new paradigm of creativity and
originality in digital era. The Tactile Renga emerged out of the encounter
of these two artistic experiments.
Tactile Renga starts in early 1998 with two of Mitsushima's paintings as
the "seeds". Using a scanner each painting would be digitized,
and modified by Anzai and by Nakamura on their computers. The new Renga
images would then be transformed into tactile forms and sent to Mitsushima
for further transformation. Through this process, a "conversation on
form" emerged around the issues such as "what is seeing" or
"What is touching" .
This process went back and forth over a pair of conversation lines, one
between Nakamura and Mitsushima, the other between Anzai and Mitsushima.
Viewers can see how the crossbreeding takes place as intentional
cross-talk between two lines occur.
