The Fukui Media Art Festival was an important event for video in the 80’s run by the Japanese artist, Keigo Yamamoto. In 1990 he invited me to do a connection between Nancy and his city, Fukui, on the western coast of Japan, using ISDN. ISDN, Integrated Services Digital Network, was developed in France and was only beginning in other parts of the world. The technical problems were enormous and after discussing it with our friends at France-Cable-Radio, Wael Layoun asked if the festival could pay his way to Japan to work out the technical configuration.
On leaving the airplane in Japan, Wael took out a list of 64 parameters, saying he had to try them in all possible combinations to make the two sides compatible. He worked for 5 days straight, 20 hours a day to make it work. The temple image shown here was the first image sent from Nancy to Japan, a technical break-through.
The second image was sent by Japan to Nancy a couple of days later. The poster was for the exhibition.
Image of Japan reworked and sent from Nancy to Fukui
Keigo Yamamoto (far right) with his students and officials from Fukui
French image reworked and sent from Fukui to Nancy
Hiroshi Maeda & Don Foresta during the presentation
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