Jikken Kobo (experimental workshop)

Jikken Kobo, meaning experimental workshop, was an interdisciplinary group of artists, musicians, choreographers and poets founded in Tokyo in 1951 that drew inspiration from European and American avant-garde artists. The association included some fourteen members, among them the composer Toru Takemitsu, the artists Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and Shozo Kitadai, the pianist Takahiro Sonoda and others. The group sought to overcome the boundaries between different art forms and to create synthetic, integrated works combining visual art, music, poetry, dance, theatre and new technical means, notably slide projection and tape recording. Its members staged concert-presentations in which music, visual imagery and stage action merged into a single whole, and also developed early forms of audiovisual installation. Jikken Kobo operated in the context of the postwar Japanese avant-garde, when the country was actively absorbing and reinterpreting international modernist currents. The group lasted until roughly the end of the 1950s and had a significant influence on the later development of Japanese experimental, electronic and intermedia art.