Kazumichi Fujiwara (藤原和通)
Emily Ma
What does your favorite song smell like? What is the texture of a track? How do we invent new ways of using our senses?
Kazumichi Fujiwara was a sound artist and inventor who pioneered the sonic experiential medium throughout his lifetime. Starting in the 1960's, Fujiwara participated in performances globally as part of the FLUXUS movement and lived in the northern alps of Italy for 14 years, experimenting with the tactility and “smell” of sound, completely unaware of “Walkman” by Sony and other technological advancement in Japan during the 1980's. He returned to Japan in 1989, with freedom from such mass influences and a belief that the world of “sound and vibration” is progressing far behind the image-based graphic arts world. By 1991 and his i-D Japan interview, he’d invented a variety of audio wearables such as a neural soundsystem that dimensionalized sound, a spinning speaker that created a hyper in-air audioimage, and a microphone for recording physical pulses.