端山貢明語録／現代の時代様式とは？ (Sayings of Hayama Kōmei: What Is the Period Style of Our Own Age?)

Notes

From the 端山貢明アーカイブ (Hayama Kōmei Archive), item 9966 in the 講演・講義 category, registered 2022-10-04: https://d-commons.net/hayama/?c=&p=9966. Published by the 端山貢明アーカイブプロジェクト (Hayama Kōmei Archive Project), directed by 前川道博 (Michihiro Maekawa) of Nagano University, on the D-Commons platform, and licensed CC BY (表示). The source documents come from the 端山文庫, the papers kept in Hayama's laboratory at Tohoku University of Art and Design, digitised by the project with the agreement of his family; his autograph scores were given to the University History Archives of the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2026. Source: An entry in the archive's 端山貢明語録 (Sayings of Hayama Kōmei) series, published as a video excerpt on YouTube (https://youtu.be/n4TGbtTPkwQ). The PDF is a single frame from that video showing Hayama seated at a desk in a university computer room lined with iMac G3s and CRT workstations.. Dated: recorded 31 January 2003. The archive publishes this item as 1 separate page scan rather than as a PDF; the download here was assembled from those scans in page order, each taken at the higher of the two resolutions the archive serves. One of two short extracts the archive has published from an informal conversation recorded on 31 January 2003 at a meeting of the メディアテーク研究会 (Mediatheque Study Group), whose members included teaching staff from the music department of Osaka University of Arts, where Hayama taught for a period as a part-time correspondence-course lecturer after retiring from Tohoku University of Art & Design in 1999. The topic is a complaint turned into a question. Imitations of Rodin and other nineteenth-century sculpture are planted in Japanese urban space as public art; Hayama treats this as visual pollution and asks what it reveals — if a city reaches for a borrowed historical idiom whenever it wants to look cultured, then it has no idiom of its own, and the real question is 「現代の時代様式とは何なのか」, what the period style of the contemporary actually is. The question is the same one that drives his writing on computer animation and on media twenty-five years earlier: a period's style is not a matter of taste but of what its characteristic means of production and communication make possible, and a society that has not found its own has not yet caught up with its own technology. As a document it is thin — a few minutes of talk, preserved as a frame and a caption — but it is useful as evidence that the argument about the agency of the access side stayed with him to the end of his teaching life and that he applied it to the built environment as readily as to media. The computer room visible behind him, full of turn-of-the-century Apple hardware, dates the recording as precisely as the caption does. People named: 端山貢明 (Hayama Kōmei), ロダン (Auguste Rodin). Noted: The PDF holds no text at all; the account of what was said rests on the archive's catalogue note for the video. The filing term 語録 (sayings) is the archive's; the object is a video excerpt, not a printed quotation sheet. No duration is given for this extract, and no other participants in the Mediatheque Study Group are named. The room in the frame is not identified; the caption gives only the date.