I managed to steal 4 hours sleep in the last night as a couple of videos were transcoding. So exhausting… earlier in the night I had been packing every thing that could be packed that wasn’t doing the capture so we could leave on time. Sho woke me with the news that we could drop off the videos at Matsumoto’s house to his wife and daughter outside. The good doctor would be just feet away, we joked about pushing them aside and running into the house shouting Matsumotohhhhh manically (not seriously though!).
Until finding his 1998 lecture on one of the tapes, I had only ever been able to find one small image of Dr. Matsumoto, as a contributor to an edition of Steven Krivit’s “New Energy Times”, an image I repurposed for my Kickstarter launch video for Dr. Alexander Parkhomov’s SPACE.EARTH.HUMAN. translation and new edition effort. It would be such a shame to not meet him in the flesh having come so far, but we had to respect his condition and the wishes of his family.
We found out also, that the videos we had now fully captured (with just 90mins of one tape captured on the dodgy intermittent Hitachi), were the ‘successful’ experiments. So we assume there is no great loss by not capturing the rest that held back. This made us feel we had done everything possible in our time.
We left our tiny, efficient apartment behind, just as we found it… just. And just in time (ok, 16 mins late, but it’s a secret between us riiight?)
I felt Dr. Matsumoto was a kindred spirit, whose research technique started with observing what nature actually does to witness materials and in video sequences. There for, I decided he may appreciate having a bunch of comparative images of his findings compared with ours and other third party work as tactile, in-your-hand media. The plan was to use the 10am - 12:30pm slot somewhere to bash together this work and print it off and so I tasked Sho with finding a place to print the artwork when I had it done.
He found that one could take various storage devices to many 7-11s and use a machine there to do prints. Perfect.
So I would go to a coffee shop and do the compositions, and Sho would take the Hitachi to a bunch of second had stores and see if he could off-load it. I located a place where I could work and settled in after ordering my wake up juice. In a little while I was presented with coffee, in a way I had never been presented before in a public coffee shop, a lovely decorated china cup and saucer…
Sho joined me after a while, recounting the story that he had not been able to get anything for the VHS deck - rather that he had been asked to PAY for it to be taken off him! That was the bad news…
The GOOD NEWS - was that we could meet Dr. Takaaki Matsumoto! The pressure was really on now… About an 90 mins later, and not a moment to lose, I emerged with memory stick in hand…
It was a quick turnaround at the 7-11 and we were off in a taxi to meet the master!
All smiles!
Miracle magic meeting!
It was a truly special encounter. So special.
Here are the print files of the images we gave to him
Matsumoto - in the flesh