Streaming free for the month of October, Vtape presents Nobuo Kubota‘s delightful 2008 video Loop Holes. Kubota, a beloved visual artist, sound artist, and architect, died one year ago, on Sept. 30, 2025, at the age of 93, and is very much missed. Annette Mangaard’s intimate documentary about Kubota, I Am the Art NOBUO KUBOTA, was released in 2025.
For Loop Holes, Kubota used the Video Lab to recontextualize an improvisational sound poem. By sequentially staggering and then looping and rearranging each sequence in a random pattern, Kubota’s performance is transformed into an endless, aleatoric nonet which combines meta-language, vocables and physical gestures in a fascinating recuperation of space, time and memory. Loop Holes creates a sense of opto-acoustic textural chaos in the audio-visual field.
In other words: it’s tons of fun!
Loop Holes
Nobuo Kubota (Canada, 2008, 11:44)
Nobuo Kubota (1932 – 2025) began his career as an architect after graduating from the University of Toronto’s architecture program with honours in 1959. After ten years of practice, he left architecture to devote his life to art, though architecture would remain the most powerful influence in his work for the next 50 years. His early sculptures reflect the influence of the constructivist and minimalist sculptors. The major part of his work over the years has been involved with sculpture installations. His work has no obvious connection to any kind of art movements.
In 1964, he spent 14 months in Japan, investigating the impact of Zen and Shintoism on its art and culture. When he returned to Canada, his work strongly reflected the influence of the time spent in Japan. As writer Kit Lort expressed it: “Nobuo Kubota’s mature work has a shifting sensibility which seems at one moment to be innately Japanese, at another essentially Western but employing specific Japanese references…The sense of searching revealed in the development of his career can be read as an acknowledgment of a certain uneasy sense of cultural history.”
Later in his career, his visual work focused on visual sound poetry, exploring the strategy of “intermedia,” and serving as an extension to his vocal work. His interest in Japanese calligraphy led him to explore and develop his own style of calligraphy, which he uses to write scores for vocal presentation.
In the late 1960s, Kubota played with the Artists’ Jazz Band with artists Gord Rayner, Graham Coughtry, and Robert Markle. He also performed with the improvising orchestra CCMC from 1974 to 1991, and was one of the founding members of the Music Gallery. During this period, he was introduced to sound poetry by the Four Horsemen, and he continued to evolve and develop this vocal technique. Kubota’s extended vocal technique explores the boundaries of the human voice, and although his work is not based in language, it uses the phonic and sonic elements of speech in its expression to present a diverse form of communication. As a vocalist, he performed in some of Europe’s most prestigious sound poetry festivals. He published two books, Phonic Slices and Deep Text, with Coach House Books.
In 2009, Nobuo Kubota received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and was awarded a Doctor of Fine Arts, Honoris Causa, from OCAD University.
Image credit: Loop Holes, by Nobuo Kubota (2008)