Japanese Experimental Films and Videos will be showing from the 19th of March until the 16th of April at APNews.

The Experimental Workshop (実験工房 Jikken kōbō) was a transdisciplinary collective of composers, visual artists, a lighting designer, a printer, and an engineer in the 1950s in Tokyo. They created events that took different experimental forms – ballets, poetry readings, contemporary music recitals and vinyl-listening sessions in art environments. They also produced the world‘s first diaporamas with magnetic tapes, which were called Autoslides. The Jikken kōbō members participated in two short films in the 1950s: Ginrin, a surrealist commercial for bicycles, created in collaboration with Toshio Matsumoto, and Kiné Calligraph, an abstract film inspired by the work of Norman McLaren. The collective‘s composers, such as Toru Takemistu, Kuniharu Akiyama, or Joji Yuasa, would later collaborate on numerous and diverse film projects, from Akira Kurosawa’s epics to the underground animes of Yoji Kuri.

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