Video: Vroom. This video of Tokyo called Tokyo Aglow by Justin Tierney shows the city by rail and by road, offering an especially hypnotising take on an already electric city. The video accelerates the trains to hyper speed, and the effect bends the lights into what looks more like a trip through a space tunnel than a normal train ride.
Seeing the masses of people cross the street with the cars zipping by also shows the controlled chaos and the speed by which the city moves, too. There’s just so much going on everywhere.
The automated Yurikamome flows through Odaiba and arrives downtown. A taxi whips to converging clusters of crowds in Shibuya. Scores surge, stream and swarm, tangle and scramble. Patterns of people, probabilities and periodicities, play. Weaving and knotting, the masses rhythmically engage with the machinery of modern life.
Koto inspired chords underpin the music of the piano. Trombone, trumpet and violin map to the patterns recurrent and emergent. Crosswalk chimes, chirps and cuckoos echo into the night.