Ryu Furusawa (JP)
Mid Tide #3
Video installation, silent, seamless loop, 48:49 min
2024
Mid Tide #3, Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo, 2024. Photo by Ryu Furusawa
Give yourself over to the succession of waves and become one with them: the impulse to locate yourself at a static point in space fades, and space and time come to feel relative. Waves, it turns out, are continuous not only in space but ceaselessly in time. This way of grasping waves through surfing is hard to convey in moving image, because recording and playback do no more than treat a sequence of two-dimensional images as time. I therefore designed software that builds a solid out of video data — two dimensions plus time — with the time axis as its depth, and slices that solid along arbitrary planes.
The material is a long fixed-camera recording of waves breaking against rocks on the Pacific coast of Chiba, Japan. Recorded at 4K and 120 fps, it holds both the slow shifts of light and tide that the eye overlooks and the minute movements of the waves the eye cannot catch.
In this work, the solid built from that footage is sliced by a cross-section that moves freely, like surfing, undoing our habitual perception of time and space.
Mid Tide #3 was realised with support from the Project to Support Emerging Media Arts Creators, Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan (2023), and Arts Council Tokyo (Startup Grant).
Ryu Furusawa is an artist and surfer based in Tokyo and Chiba. He works with the way moving image represents the experience of time while intervening in the structure that produces it, searching in practice for alternatives to the perceptions of time and space that visual media have naturalised. Recent exhibitions include Mission ∞ Infinity (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2026), Rear Window & Real Wonder (HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, 2025) and ICC Annual 2024 (NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo). Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica 2024.