Jordon and I met up at Osaki stn. this morning (both of us a bit bleary eyed!) at 11ish and then continued on our way to Tokyo Big Sight to check out Design-Festa volume 24. Design Festa is a twice-yearly event out at Tokyo Big Sight which runs along the same theme as their gallery (which I visited earlier and posted lots of pictures of the outside) - basically anyone can exhibit their stuff, so there is a huge variety on display! It is the largest art and design show in Asia.

There is no way I could do any sort of justice to describing it, think university art show/Christmas craft fair/rainbow you can walk in times about 1000, and you might get a vague idea. There were literally more than a thousand small booths, with one or two artists at each one, and the stuff ranged from clothing to music to postcards to cartoons to...? It was pretty amazing! Sensory overload though! After the first couple of hours, we realised we'd stopped actually seeing everything and that it was turning into a big blur, so we collapsed in a corner to stare at some grey concrete and re group... We weren't the only ones! Around the entire, carnaverous hall were people leaning up against the wall, sleeping or staring dazedly into space - it was an exhausting proposition to get through the entire thing!

We did our best though, and almost got through the entire thing, we only glossed over the last few rows. Highlights included a massive model of an anime world, complete with buildings, lights, train tracks etc. on a huge foam earth type thing, a cartoon with the 'soft cream disaster', various fantastic photographers, stuffed food dolls and toys of various varietyies (such as beans and wasabi), and the guy who made these incredible masks and full body costumes out of foam, such as big horse heads and whole body hippo suits...

There were a few recurring themes, one of which was bizarre and slightly worrying dolls kind of in the style of Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride (which is very popular here!), often in various states of undress, dark clothing, and just a slightly creepy aura around them...(but i've never been a huge fan of those kind of dolls or clowns and the such) On the other extreme, there was a whole lot of cute, with tons of abstract patterns, bright colors, and the things like the food as stuffed animal genre.... Most places were selling things, there was an incredible over abundance or postcards, buttons, and keitai decorations! Probably a good idea though, I think there was just so much going on that people probably weren't buying big things, choosing to wait and see, and then getting overwhelemed or forgetting where that cool (fabric, clothing, painting, furniture, clothing, etc) place had been. We picked up a few things - Christmas presents on Jordon's part, and a tee shirt w/ silkscreening that I got from some people Jordon knew, randomly...

As well as the art, there was a variety of food (we visited the French stand), and an indoor and outdoor stage... We took our lunch outside and listened to a couple of songs by a band possibly called 'machine hayato', if I'm remembering what time we were there correctly... We also saw part of a taiko drumming (and dijireedoo type instrument) preformance by Gocoo on the indoor stage - there is a lot of energy involved in one of those drum groups-fantastic!

One of Jordon's friends happen to spot us from across the stage while watching the drumming, so we checked out the last few booths and then met up with him and headed back into town on the train, dropping him at Shibuya, with Jordon and me continuing on to Mejiro to prepare for the second event of the day, Yuki and Kevin's wedding party at Mac's Carrot. It was a great event! About 50 people, mostly split between Orbitune (Yukiko works for orbitune) and non orbitune people, and it was very casual and relaxed. They had their incredibly talented friends preform throughout the night which was great - we had (among others, there were quite a few!), a couple of piano preformances, and indian dance, singing a capella, and a lovely rendition of 'Ave Maria', electric guitar, trumpet, etc.... It was amazing how many talented people they know! We were treated to a buffet style dinner (italian mostly), and a delicious cake made by Felly...

It was great to see everyone from Orbitune again, and everyone had a fantastic time, Congratulations to Yukiko and Kevin, of course! Tomorrow, I'll be adding photos and links, so when I put photos up from the wedding party, I'll add in more details about what's going on/what happened... Stay tuned for part two tomorrow, I don't have the energy to sort through photos and links and stories right now! (plus the blogger templates are down again, so I can't post links, or photos again, hopefully by tomorrow it will be ok!) It's not even that late, only 1am, but I'm telling you, that Design Festa was draining! (but totally worth it-so much cool stuff!)

more tomorrow,
D.