Since the late 1960s he has participated in numerous international film and video festivals, and supported the work of younger generations of artists as a mentor.
[2] In 1969 Nakajima was assigned to photograph Psi Zashiki Room, a remote conceptual installation by artist Yutaka Matsuzawa, for the major art publication Bijutsu techō.
[3][4] Nakajima's work as a photographer and filmmaker in 1960s earned him a role in Expo '70 as the film director for the various moving images displayed in the Mitsui Pavilion, organized by Katsuhiro Yamaguchi.
Male photographers and a videographer surrounded the table, some with mouths taped, and each gave orders about the poses she should take at will, oftentimes competing for her attention.
This resulted in discord and at some point the men began to strip and sat atop the table as the woman took a video camera in her hand and shot footage of them, ending with a celebratory gesture by the group.
Due to its explicit content, the screenings of this work were limited, but the approach of recording the same subject in film and photography simultaneously was repeated in other Video Earth experiments as well.
These images were placed side-by-side, forcing viewers to shift attention between the two channels, thereby creating a "first-person feel to the work that refuses exteriority and pure objectivity.
Art historian Nina Horisaki-Christens positions this approach to remediation, in which successive versions of the footage incorporate increasingly complex visual effects, as indicative of an ecological continuum that ties together machine and biological life.
[12] Since the 1980s Nakajima has produced a series of works, often featured in video and media festivals, that use synthesizers to manipulate images related to the environment.
[13] Such interest in ecological themes carried into Nakajima's 1990s video installation works that combined natural elements, such as chopped tree trunks and piles of sand, with disassembled, broken, or otherwise damaged technology salvaged from junk yards and garbage dumps.