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Air's Song
Komatsu's work has been characterized by a visualization of the minute movements of the natural world. On the surface, his work is very simple, and the movements that can be seen in it are so light-handed as to make us forgot that the production involves various forms of technology. His purpose is not to extol the novelty of the latest technology. Rather, it is to appeal to those nostalgic memories that we as modern people are in the process of forgetting because of that technology.
Life Log_Air's Songis one work that, in particular, expresses Komatsu's poetic contemplation of life. A material that has often featured in his work is bird feathers. In Life Log_Air's Song too, the individual bird feathers that he carefully encloses inside multiple transparent tubes float upwards together and then slowly downwards by the air pressure from an air compressor that he controls precisely with a computer. The word "log" in the title of the work is the computing term for "memory." The bird feathers also possess, through their DNA, a memory of life. Komatsu casts the bird feathers separated from the living organism and occasionally used as decorative objects into the moving air again in the way they used to be.
The feathers floating upwards remind us of the fact that they were once part of a living organism, and drifting downwards, of the state of being separated from that living organism, that is, of death. Life and death is repeated with a constant rhythm.
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