As source material we gathered field recordings from Todohyo, Toyooka, the Izushi River, and mined the local library for documents, maps, and vintage aerial photography culminating in the work Video 1.

paper frottage: ‘Scroll’,
by alpha_alpha,2026
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The observations of the historical building and our appreciation for place-related encounters slowly revealed that the surfaces are significant to how they create an atmosphere. Surfaces that also enabled a soft acoustic warmth in the room. Over the course of the residency a 30 metre scroll was developed into what became as much a durational work as it was a spatial intervention. A daily ritual of creating new markings on paper.

Developed were a series of frames to view and capture moments in – to create a device that changes a surfaces meaning. Those were made in card template form as a way to create a hard edged boundary for soft mark making materials such as charcoal.

Frottage markings and templates were inspired by the local architectural details, the Tajima regions landscape as well as particularities or historical architectural details from from the house itself.

Here, we sat with the space for some time. It slowly revealed to us certain surface qualities and construction details. We brought attention to the truss roof system with a spatial intervention using the 30 metre paper scroll. The paper scroll being chosen for its frameless qualities, (affordable and available from a local stationery shop) also for its length. It was draped over the truss beams at four positions and plunged towards the floor surface. Mark making played an important role. The scroll was taken to various parts of the house. There the surfaces, textures of the buildings materials were rendered visible through charcoal, lead and pastel.

Guided by the hard-edged card templates we made extended frottage studies (rubbings) of the buildings architectural details, using pastel, lead and colour pencil applied to the scroll. We generated a sequence of marks and textures along 30 metres.

Open Studio events encouraged visitors to make their own frottages on supplied washi paper. These were collected and displayed throughout the day.


Surface treatments in-situ: ‘Planars’
by alpha_alpha,2026
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A/V Video 1 sculpture: ‘Time Totem’,
by alpha_alpha,2026
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Soft acoustic warmth lent itself to a natural environment to present a sound and visual intervention. The ideology of a loudspeaker as a visible object was removed. Speakers placed at discrete locations within the space allowed sound to penetrate into the room but without prior knowledge of there exact position/s. The readymade aspect of loudspeakers integrated into the CRT TVs was also exploited and used for there rather idiosyncratic sonic qualities.

A vertical assemblage that was titled ‘Time Totem’ encapsulated the duo’s approach to location, readymades, accumulated information, legacy technologies and systems, architecture and history. Here, found objects from the significant and architecturally listed house are stacked by the date of their fabrication...vertical layers of time. Beginning with the eldest (Samurai box) at the base. At Time Totem's uppermost level are two CRT TVs showing a ‘Video 1’ generated with re-photographed material from a local Library — using a circular cutout centre from a found record sleeve as a readymade framing device.

The audio component was generated and composed entirely with location recordings captured in the Toyooka region and Todohyo itself.

As a final act of the residency, and carefully placed at its base inside the Samurai box, was the unique 30 metre paper scroll.

A/V installation, scroll & projection: ‘Scroll presence’,
by alpha_alpha,2026
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A/V Video 1 sculpture: ‘Tokonoma’,
by alpha_alpha,2026
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Complementing the spatial intervention, a hidden loudspeaker (in an alcove wall mounted cupboard) projected diffused location recordings around that area of the room (known as Tokonoma), bypassing the traditional and ideological structure of speakers being visible to compliment the idiosyncratic audio of CRT TV readymades. These sounds blended, crossed over and through when played back in the space.