See What One Artist Made During 17 Hours in Transit

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During international air travel, most of us zone out, watch movies and wait to be brought tiny packaged food. But Brooklyn-based Japanese artist Tomokazu Matsuyama made the most of his notebook's 17-hour battery life while in transit between Tokyo and Sydney. After unplugging the power lead from his Toshiba Portégé Z20T notebook, he made a full suite of finished artwork, all ready for exhibition, before he lost power.

Combining cutting-edge technology and the quirkiness of Japanese popular culture, the pieces went on display for two nights only (June 24 and 25) at the Quayside Room of the Museum of Contemporary Art for Toshiba's Made in 17 Hours.

Prior to boarding the flight, Matsuyama zipped around Tokyo taking some quick snaps of his favourite places and drew some preliminary sketches in the departure lounge. On the plane he used the laptop-tablet hybrid to create a colourful collection of images, blending traditional Edo-period influences with a more Western and urban sensibility.

To convey Matsuyama’s process, the exhibition featured a time lapse, which is like watching the construction and assembly of an eclectic jigsaw puzzle. He breaks up photographs of downtown Tokyo (shrines, nightlife, neon signs and seas of umbrellas) and splices the fragments with his custom-made patterns. Over an Asahi and a sushi roll, you could even use the notebooks on display to experiment with whipping up your own painterly textures.

Matsuyama is a self-taught artist, and this is his first venture into digital painting. Usually his work involves months of meticulous labour with the help of a handful of assistants. This experiment has turned out to be a pretty epic accomplishment for only 17 hours work and very little elbow room.