OBEY ARCHIVES: Tokyo Roof

This Tokyo Roof image is based on a still from video shot in the year 2000 by my friend Naomi when I was putting up an 8 foot high icon face poster on an 11-story building across a plaza from one of the busiest subway exits in all of Tokyo (and probably anywhere else in the world). I went up to the roof and leaned over, using a long extension pole to paste up the icon face. It only ended up staying up for about a week, but that is long enough for hundreds of thousands of people to potentially see it. There are a few things I really love about the image, One, the angle Naomi was filming from shows the height, perspective, and physicality of executing the piece. Two, the combination of the video grain and digital treatment yield a texture that is almost pointillistic like a Georges Seurat painting. I reject the binary argument of analog versus digital because they both have process and result benefits. Ultimately I love when there is a magic to how things mutate and when they are translated through a process by choice or necessity. This piece made a journey from physical installation, to video documentation, to selecting a still, to digital manipulation, to an analog screen printing… with edits and mutations at each step. I even refined the colors to create this NFT. -Shepard