“Opening up new routes” is a series in which we consider the form art projects should take in response to the coming era as we look back on art projects developed since 2011and the social climate surrounding them. The series navigator is Takashi Serizawa (Director, P3 art and environment), who has closely observed art projects that occur in response to social conditions with a focus on the interaction between people and the environment. We record the perspectives and activities of various art project practitioners, reflecting on how society has developed in the last ten years, and how art projects have responded. In addition, the aim is to find new routes ahead to a new era by thinking about the future form of art projects together with people capable of becoming practitioners of art projects going forward.

A great number of “hubs” exist in the communities we live in. We took a tour of some of the hubs that have been set up in Metropolitan Tokyo and interviewed their management teams. These interviews are available to the public on two platforms: a radio broadcast and written articles reporting on the tour. Reflecting on what those involved in the operation of these hubs had to say, we think together about Tokyo as it is today.

A great number of activities take place in the communities we live in. They all have different objectives, group composition, operational approaches, areas of activity, and fields. A wide range of practices impossible to lump together have likewise accrued in terms of cultural projects. For the project “Artpoint Radio: Listening in Tokyo,” we ask our guests, practitioners working in the fields of arts and culture, about their ventures, experiences, and outlooks on the future, broadcasting our discussions in a two-part radio program. We use their different perspectives to think together about the near future for Tokyo, a city that changes every day.

The varied landscape that makes up a city is organized in a lifestyle-friendly way, with people going about their daily lives within an urban framework they take for granted. Within this environment today, this program provides a forum for us to stop for a moment, take a step back, and interpret and re-examine the things that we take for granted.
What will appear to us if we stop and take a closer look at the things around us in our daily lives? What are we overlooking in everyday life? What is the relationship between these things and us? By slightly changing our perspective on the things we experience every day without really thinking about, we may discover new things and cultural values.

We have been working to improve the web accessibility of the Tokyo Art Research Lab (TARL) website by getting people with disabilities to review the design, layout, coding, and other aspects. On the other hand, the recommendations made in their reviews are wide-ranging and concerns about web accessibility are never-ending. We learn as we go, but new questions and doubts arise the more we learn. In this program, we start afresh from the question of what exactly web accessibility is and explore the future for websites by looking back at feedback from users we talked to face to face who access websites from a variety of environments, regardless of whether they have a disability or not.

Community archives are a way for local people to preserve and make use of records of their communities. This is a program for widely sharing these skills by combining the records of multiple regions and experiences.
We make use of knowledge from resources such as Sendai Mediatheque, a multi-purpose cultural facility which opened the “Center for Remembering 3.11” after the Great East Japan Earthquake and became a platform for a variety of projects in which local people preserve records and engage in diverse activities; Art Support Tohoku-Tokyo which Tokyo Metropolitan Government and Arts Council Tokyo have worked on since 2011; and the Tokyo Artpoint Project’s Karoku Recycle initiative. In 2024, we will hold a discussion to share skills developed in response to devastating earthquake damage to the Noto Peninsula.

Tokyo Artpoint Project offers a range of support and initiatives which are designed to help projects take root in the community, and which are based on frontline views and comments generated through project practices. We also put time into nurturing projects and organizations using a process-oriented approach. We will create tools in English, translate materials, and make them publicly available in order to widely disseminate information in Japan and overseas on project frameworks and methods, as well as information on current project activities generated under them.