Dystokyo

Tokyo is both the inspiration and the studio for both Simon's glitch art and Zoria's cyber[punk] poetry. We create on the move, oftentimes on the commute, with the excitement, immediacy and restlessness that only Tokyo can stir up, and because the nature of the city also limits time and space for creativity. It's a utopian/dystopian cocktail you can taste in the art and poetry of this book, both tackling themes including futurism, euphoria, belonging, hypercapitalism, alienation, devices and internet addiction.

Although the art and the poetry were created separately, we soon converged and realized they complement each other. The glitch art looks the way Tokyo feels. It's shifting, chaotic, exciting and it's unfathomable. Simon digitally paints with deconstruction, disintegration, repetition, multiplication, stretching and reflection. The separation of spaces in the image and in the architecture opens up a fourth spatial dimension of sorts. The poems are glitchy too - with odd word and line placements, stretched rules of punctuation and grammar, neologisms, imagined linguistic shifts in the future, foreign languages sneaked in. One poem title is tucked at the bottom of the poem, while another poem is looped back and forth ("Are You Still Watching?" - alluding to binge watching media).