VSinger “HACHI” MV This was created around the keyword “stagnant pastel,” expressing the feelings of sinking into the everyday and the desire to stay positive.

“Mobile Literature” (English: Mobile Literature) is a series that seeks to merge movement by bicycle and projection technology with literary expression, using a bicycle modified as a visual device to project texts written for each city onto the ground of those places while cycling through them. To date, the project has been carried out in Japan around the Tama River, in Ōgaki City, Gifu Prefecture, Atami, and around Tokyo Station, and overseas in Cairo (Egypt), Lusaka (Zambia), and London (United Kingdom). This work, “Mobile Literature: Kawasaki in the Shotashimura,” is a piece in which text written on the theme of southern Kawasaki City is edited into a visual work, and the text is projected onto the ground while cycling through the area at night on a bicycle. In “Mobile Literature,” writing is the act of inscribing into text the bodily sensation of motion, and the rhythm of breathing and travel, gained through the speed of a bicycle: slower than a car, yet faster than walking, at a human scale. The letters projected onto the ground are linked to physical sensations such as the force applied to the pedals, vibrations from the road surface, and changes in incline; they fluctuate, alter their shading according to speed and the texture of the road, and emerge with a singular, one-time expression, even when the same sentence appears. By treating bicycles and urban space itself as media, this series pursues the possibilities of literary expression rooted in place, as well as a reading experience impossible on paper or digital media. At the same time, because Ōgaki City, Gifu Prefecture—the site of the first work in the series—is the final destination of Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the project aims to develop around the world, in the spirit of Bashō’s journey and contemplation.

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