Dual Doodle Double Square

Acclaimed 21st-century science fiction writer Ted Chiang (b. 1967) wrote the short story “Story of Your Life,” on which the 2016 film Arrival was based.² The protagonist, Louise Banks—portrayed in the film by Amy Adams—is a linguist who attempts to communicate with two extraterrestrial beings referred to as “heptapods.” The heptapods communicate by extruding ink from two tentacle-like appendages to produce one ideogram that represents everything at once—with no linear sequence or temporality. The writing systems that human beings use are bound by temporality and linearity, having been designed to fit spoken language; having long been conditioned, therefore, to apprehend the world in the same way, the humans in the film struggled to comprehend the all-encompassing meaning of the heptapods’ ideographic script. As the story progresses—and as Banks gradually decodes the language and learns to use it as a medium of communication—she begins to perceive time differently, suddenly gaining memories of events that have not yet occurred. This was the premise of the story.

This communication with the heptapods finds parallels with Koganezawa’s vinyl record analogy, as well as with the paired drawings and videos in this exhibition. All these expressions probe our perception of the “part” and the “whole,” reflecting on how we cognize the world.

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), best known for his influential book Understanding Media, contended that “all media—in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate—exert a compelling influence on man and society.” ³

McLuhan holds that prehistoric man existed in a harmonious sensory balance, perceiving the world through the equal use of hearing, smell, touch, sight, and taste. But innovations in technology expanded some of our senses and ended up changing this balance. In his view, it was the invention of the written language, in particular the alphabet, and later of printing and movable type, which resulted in the dominance of sight above our other senses, explaining as follows:

Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached.⁴

Since the invention of language to the present day, humans have understood the world primarily grounded in the concept of causality—on the premise that causes produce effects. However, the “heptapods” of Arrival, which express the world with ideograms that equate past, present, and future, operate on what Ted Chiang’s original short story calls a “simultaneous mode of awareness.” While the invention of written language and the development of media through technological innovation have expanded our visual perception of the world, one might argue that we have also lost in that process our original perception of time that connected us to the world.

Meanwhile, American anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) wrote about the structure of communication, saying,

…the fact of conformity or nonconformity (or indeed any other relationship) between parts of a patterned whole may itself be informative as part of some still larger whole.⁵

Analyzing the stylistic qualities found in the art of indigenous peoples, Bateson’s essay discusses the “grace” that humans in modernized societies have lost, arguing that grace is the “integration [of] the diverse parts of the mind.”

What components of this message material had what orders of unconsciousness (or consciousness) for the artist? […] Art becomes, in this sense, an exercise in communicating about the species of unconsciousness. Or, if you prefer it, a sort of play behavior whose function is, amongst other things, to practice and make more perfect communication of this kind.⁶

Koganezawa’s works in this exhibition center on the perceptions of time and the sense of “grace” that have been lost to humanity due to the developments in communication, as outlined by McLuhan and Bateson. Koganezawa’s analogy of the vinyl record illustrates this perfectly: through our sense of hearing, we listen, in sequence and from start to finish, to the music on the record with its inherent temporality; through our sense of sight, we grasp at a glance the entirety of the music engraved upon it. If we were to be able to liberate our minds from the constructs of causality and temporal tenses, these two distinct perceptions of music would essentially become one and the same perception of the “whole.”

The previously mentioned film, Arrival, centers precisely on this lost perception of time. It could be said that this also relates closely to what Koganezawa is attempting to recreate through his own creative process and its products. In these works, Koganezawa deliberately focuses his own consciousness on the part under self-imposed creative parameters. What emerges as a result, however—the two drawings and one video—represents a whole formed through the integration of “diverse parts of the mind.” Even while Koganezawa continually directs attention to the part through the camera monitor, there arises outside of the artist’s consciousness a “graceful” and potent whole that seeks to apprehend everything at once. This state of perceiving “everything at once” perhaps represents the structure of that lost perception of the world. When we perceive as one “whole” the time that is woven into Koganezawa’s drawings and video—that is to say, when the exhibited installation begins to radiate as one whole—perhaps the world will present itself to us in all its grace.

1.Koganezawa, Takehiko. ‘Double Sister, Divided Brothers.’ Exhibition at LOOCK Galerie, Berlin.

2.A 2016 U.S. science fiction movie directed by Denis Villeneuve and adapted by Eric Heisserer from “Story of Your Life,” a short story by Ted Chiang. Starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker et al., the movie received eight nominations at the 89th Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay, and won Best Sound Editing.

3.McLuhan, Marshall. “The Playboy Interview: Candid Conversations with the Priest of Pop Culture and Media Metaphysician.” In The Essential McLuhan, edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone.

4.McLuhan, Marshall. Ibid.
While the tribal/literate framework can be insightful when taken to denote stages of human history, it becomes an outdated and highly problematic misrepresentation when McLuhan applies it to non-Western cultures of his own time. The quotation has been cautiously included to allow exploration of the impact of written language on human perception.

5.Bateson, Gregory. “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972.

6.Bateson, Gregory. Ibid. p.146–7.