This first monograph accompanies a series of videos inspired by the Metabolist utopist architecture movement, created in 1959 in Japan. The videos bring together several portraits of Japanese towns, combining digital images with filmed or photographed images of social and urban reality.
Pierre-Jean Giloux's first monograph, the publication extends the eponymous video tetralogy inspired by the Japanese utopian architectural movement: Metabolism (1960-70).
The films of the Invisible Cities cycle are portraits of Japanese cities, superimposing filmed and photographed images of everyday, social and urban reality, with virtual images.
The book explores the links in Pierre Jean Giloux's work that connect four Japanese cities with a rich architectural past (Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kyoto). This jorney through Japan's Megapolis traces the history of Japan and ends with the reconstruction of pavilions for the Osaka 70 Universal Exhibition and a virtual proposal for a smart city on the waters of Lake Biwa.
The metabolist utopia to which reference is constantly made in the work of Pierre Jean Giloux played a decisive role in the constitution of post-war Japanese cultural identity and had a notable influence on many contemporary architects.
Invisible Cities contains a good number of images, photographs or archives on the project, and gathers an interview with the artist Pierre Jean Giloux, reflexive, critical and philosophical texts by authors, researchers and architects Elie During, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Pierre Musso, Vincent Romany and Manuel Tardits.
The work of Pierre-Jean Giloux (born in Mâcon in 1965, living and working in Europe) is situated at the convergence of several practices: still and animated images, installations that probe space and volume. His films are the result of associations and hybridizations of media, through digital techniques, in which he develops visual and sound compositions, sometimes including animated sequences in 2 and 3 D. The boundaries between synthesized and real images fade and allow the viewer to invent his own narrative. The virtual and the real coexist within his films in order to establish a dialogue and to question their own limits, and more particularly when they are shown in the form of immersive installations with a multi-screen device, within which the spectator is invited to stroll. He also shows his films in single-band version, as part of video and digital arts festivals.
