“Our Bodies Demand Their Turn!: Live Synthesizer in Shigeko Kubota’s Riverrun—Video Water Poem” explores the relationship between live video synthesis and identity formation through the multisensory environment of Shigeko Kubota's Riverrun-Video Water Poem (1972). Read the full piece here.

Abstract

Shigeko Kubota presented her seminal multimedia video work Riverrun—Video Water Poem for the feminist performances of Red, White, Yellow, and Black at The Kitchen in New York in December 1972. This article outlines Kubota’s exploration of the mediated production of identity as a networked, social process through live video synthesis. Drawing from discourses surrounding James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in experimental music and video, Kubota’s distinctive use of live video synthesis and incorporation of sensorial elements in her installation attuned her audience to the multisensory nature of communication as well as the co-constitution of meaning mediated through feedback between artist, audience, and technology. In considering Riverrun as an open work, it is clearer how Kubota resisted singular interpretations, especially readings where the work is reducible to the artist’s identity.