A multimedia DVD with text, video, graphics, and animation, 2002

Conceived, Produced, Directed, Edited, and Played by Takahiko Iimura.
Co-produced with The Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred University, New York,Euphonic Inc., Tokyo and Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics, Tokyo. The project was made possible in part with a grant from New York State Council on the Arts.
A multimedia/interactive DVD: "Seeing / Hearing / Speaking" has two parts: a new video, "Seeing/ Hearing / Speaking", 2002, and three "Other Related Videos" produced during 1978-2001. The total running time of the video is 33min., which may be seen continuously by clicking "Autoplay" at the menu.

Based on a sentence taken from the seminal book of Jacques Derrida, French philosopher, "Speech and Phenomena" translated by David B. Allison, I produced first video "Talking to Myself" in 1978(revised in 2001). The video was highly appreciated as "the strongest, most effective statement one could make from the work of Derrida" by Professor Allison. The sentence I quoted, that Derrida calls "phenomenological essence", is that I hear myself at the same time that I speak. The new DVD, not just a transfer of video, extends further with text, and graphics, which works interactively. In "Hearing / Speaking", for instance, you can choose among the monitors with the picture of face, head, ear and mouth in the video-installation, and can read/see different programs. So that you can perceive and localize "Hearing / Speaking" with the organs. Together with "Seeing" in this DVD, I could combine the perception of "Seeing" with "Hearing / Speaking". Besides "Talking to Myself", other related videos are "Talking in New York"(1981, revised in 2001) and "Talking to Myself at PS1" (1985).

Throughout these videos I have examined the validity of an identity in video, which is different from the actual voice, between "the I who hear" and "the I who speak." It extends also to "the I who see" and "the I who is seen". The text includes "A letter to Takahiko iimura" by David B. Allison, and "On Talking to Myself" by Takahiko Iimura

"Talking to Myself (1978) seems almost preposterously ambitious; its beauty (I say this, of course, only on examining the script) seems to lie in a kind of vertigo, an infinitization of replications, mirroring, suspected detours, half-forgotten and neglected stops, arrests, reconfirmations and confusions. It surely is the strongest, most effective statement one could make from the work of Derrida." - David B. Allison, Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York at StonyBrook and the translator of "Speech and Phenomena" by Jacques Derrida.

" 'Seeing / Hearing / Speaking' DVD, which I have enjoyed very much indeed. It is, I think, a true masterpiece...because through your DVD one becomes able to grasp not only the theoretical or intellectual aspect of your relationship with Derrida's thought, but the ' vertigo' (as Allison says) of the 'deconstruction' (to use Derrida's jargon) of your own identity, i.e. a feeling, not an abstraction: a pre- or proto-theoretical full way of understanding and of living, i.e. an intuition of the 'difference' or 'differance' in Derrida's sense."
- Daniel Charles, the author of "John Cage"