In his short film Papers (1991), the Japanese artist Yoshinao Satoh assembles thousands of newspaper images into a transfixing animation. Moving through a flurry of Japanese characters, moon phases, Go games, house plans and faces that grows ever faster, Satoh creates a mass-media collage that seems to anticipate the age of information overload. Amplifying the frenzied pace and mesmerising effect, he pairs the imagery with a propulsive work by the US composer Steve Reich.
Japanese news clippings from 1991 blur into a hypnotic collage
Director: Yoshinao Satoh
24 November 2025
videoCities
Time dilates and people flow in and out of each other in a hallucinatory urban commute
3 minutes
videoCities
Bright nights, lonely crowds – a Tokyo train speeds through urban contradictions
3 minutes
videoCities
A night-time drive through Tokyo transforms into a dizzying sensory experience
2 minutes
videoFilm and visual culture
Space and time expand, contract and combust in this propulsive animation
5 minutes
videoInformation and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
videoMathematics
Delight as the hard-edged world melts into a full-rainbow spectrum of reality
2 minutes
