Artist Ko Nakajima gave an introduction to his early works during the Community Archiving Workshop on November 26, 2016.
Nakajima Ko began creating experimental animation in the 1960s, representative work being Seizoki (1964), produced by painting on the film during his solo exhibition at the Sogetsu Art Center, a space for avant-garde art in 1960s Tokyo. Intersections between film and video, as well as his practice of documenting "life," are explored in his Biological Life (1971-), which he made by manipulating film footage, copying it onto video and using a video synthesizer. In 1971, Nakajima established Video Earth Tokyo, a video-art collective formed by people from a wide variety of professions. With Video Earth Tokyo, Nakajima documented a performance piece using nascent technology, the portable video recorder. In Shokutaku ressha (video picnic) (1975), Nakajima and others cooked and ate a meal on the platform of a subway station. Another work investigating the technical materiality of video and photography, What is Photography? (1976), is two-channel piece with video documentation of thirty naked men with cameras shooting a naked woman on a table on one monitor, while the other monitor presents the still photographs taken by the men. and producing video art in 1971. That year he founded the collective Video Earth Tokyo and began broadcasting works on cable television, as well as participating in exhibitions and CG (computer graphics) conferences internationally. In the 1980s, Nakajima produced the personal computer Aniputer, created with the research department of the Japan Victor Company (JVC). The device allows the user to manipulate video and images on the computer.