Transit Tokyo
An excess of stimuli creating a psychic overload, is what makes the city according to social psychologist Stanley Milgram hard to comprehend for man and even potentially dangerous for the mind. Transit Tokyo evidently focuses on the visible impulses and furthermore deviates from Milgram’s hypothesis in contending that these stimuli are all fused into an absorbing uniformity without identity in which man not only dissolves but against which he also resists. Take for example the businessman in suit as the embodiment of the metropolis. On the one hand, he helps shaping the uniformity and disappears in it, but on the other hand it is his costume that gives him a purpose in the city. Therefore his apparel functions as a self-affirmative shield. Man shows resistance to the devouring uniformity of the city, with the mobile phone as his most versatile weapon. By calling or texting friends, and visiting social network sites, he turns his back to the city and seems to remind himself of who he is. In the exuberance of neon billboards also lies the evidence that one element can both be part of and an alternative for the homogeneous mass. To halt at one single billboard means to be confronted with something familiar, an urge projected back onto oneself. In the city the distinction between public space and means of transport fades away. Both are being reduced to a transit-area in which man advances like an encapsulated entity in an unknown organism. But the surplus value of the metro network with its established structure is that it provides clarification. It is a pattern in which man briefly enters and finds tranquillity. Transit Tokyo shows how the metropolis urges us on to explore our own identity, as an individual and as a part of the whole.