art/technology/life

2011/10/21

at:International Conference of Game Design and Interactive Creation
site:南台科技大学
date:21 October 2011

 

台湾の台南市で開催されたゲームとインタラクティブデザインに関する国際会議に招待され1990年代以降の日本におけるメディアの変容と自作品に関する基調講演をおこなった。

 

1. Introduction
There are various ways in expressions of art, and my objective is to capture and to present what is happening in reality like data base and systems do. Like a painter who draws a contour line that does not exist in reality, I would like to give an outline to the technology and media that exist now. Living the modern Japanese life, how I capture the information and the technology is important since they could affect my daily life in a big way.Firstly, I was raised by manga, anime, and computer games, and I gained my life values from them. As I turn adult, fine art joined these authorities. They say your life values get enriched through encountering others, and I made friends with classmates designated by the education system as a child, and today I put them on my Facebook. I try stopping my friend from committing suicide through Skype, and I will never be able to get to the shop recommended by an acquaintance’s tweet without a help of the GPS. And of course I check the rating of the shop’s reputation at the recommending website. My personal experience of a temporal but total blindness in my life had forced me to face the technology of “seeing,” to become serious about painting, taking photographs, and communicating about images. I also thought deeply about medical technology and morality when I found out that I had an inborn spinal injury, which could have been a subject to selective abortion according to the antepartum genetic diagnosis technology of today. The “Life” directory is placed within the “Technology” directory, and I would like to put them all in the home directory of “Art,” because I would like to live thinking about and trying out what is beautiful. It may sound cynical, but if I were to show the title in UNIX address, it will be “/~art/technology/life,” and to determine what should be in the “Life” directory and what the root directory should be, are the concepts of my work creation.
In following, I would like to introduce some works and keywords to go with them sorted by years.

2. Projects
■1998 “Is this material correct?” February 1998, Gallery Yamaguchi (Tokyo)
Is there a reality on the other side of media? The actuality of the influence which viewers can cast upon the reality through media. To suspect, to participate. In the vase set in the center of the gallery, fresh and artificial flowers are arranged together, with blue water containing a very small amount of defoliant. Photographs of the same selection of flowers are put on the wall and on a website. During the exhibition, the fresh flowers slowly die turning slightly blue, but only one flower is to rescued out from the toxic vase to the vase with a natural water, aside from whether it is a fresh or artificial one, based upon the total number of viewings of the photographs shown on the website. It is hard to distinguish between the fresh and the artificial from the low resolution images on the website. At the exhibition room, a bunch of aromatic named “floral fragrance” were set.
Keywords: Infiltration of the Internet. Suicides with home-delivered poison (Dr. Chirico case). Disposable camera boom. “Dance Dance Revolution” by Konami. Pokemon shock (December 1997).
■1999 “tracer” MEDIA SELECT, Nagoya Port Garden Warehouse
Humans desire to leave the sign of their existence, entrusting it to the technology such as words, writings, and images. It may be the man-made technology that defines what human is.A performer lays down on a piece of paper, trace his own shape and draws the outline with a pen. Then a robot traces the outline drawn by the performer, drawing a new line, but slight gaps and overlaps confuse the robot while it draws its line. Since the robot moves with two tires rotating back and forth, the traced line comes out “rough,” making the original straight lines or shallow curves slightly waved. When it lose track because of the gaps and overlaps, it searches for the line rotating on the spot, drawing a “fine” circle. It ends up roughly tracing the fine line drawn by a person, and drawing fine circles on points where human errors such as gaps and overlaps occurs.
Keywords: Sony released “AIBO”, Honda’s robot ASIMO introduced (2000), the movie “The Matrix” released
■2001 “conversational” March 2001, channel N, Kyoto Art Center
Network and AI are readymade. In order to participate in it, you have to act out a role. Say you believe it. Go along with it. Two screens are hang face to face, a male and a female shown on each, and in the middle there is a display showing a chat, a conversation in test. At a first glance, it suggests the male and the female on each screen are conversing with each other. However, their lips are not synchronized with their utterances, nor was the movie programed to link with the chat. It merely displays a dialogue of a database pretending to be two “characters” The couple on both walls are just standing, posing only to suggest that they could be those characters. From this created situation, the viewers are tricked to suppose, “a man and a woman are talking with each other”. By reading the instruction on the PC in the middle, the viewer finds out he/she can join the chat as the third party and may cut in between the two. To “join” here means to play the third character along with the program that is acting the other two, knowing that they are just a program, not real personalities. The viewer experience a conversation from the relevance of the optical information (two screens and the chat display), and share the same world (the world of text) with virtual characters through a conversation not with vocal sound, but with a text chat. The entire sentences of the conversation, the text data, input by all the audience at the exhibition is combined into the database, and is shown on the Internet as a conversation between the three (the man , the woman and all the audience).
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence. Data mining PC. Black boxed network. Opening of Wikipedia Japan. iPod release. “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” Movie. 9. 11
■2008 “landscape” March 2008, Small Token, between little stories and public sphere,
Liverpool Street Studios gallery (Adelaide)
In memory, even the artificial landscape in games and such become the same kind of experience as a real landscape. What reality is differs by people. Based on personal memory, build a diorama of a certain location. Bring the diorama to the actual location, take a photograph of the location over the diorama. When exhibiting, project the photo image taken at the location over the diorama, over the diorama. The landscape in memory could be real tourist attractions, daily scenes, stages or field maps of video games. The experience inside you could be different from the photograph, or could even be a rendered data.
Keywords: Augmented Reality. Social Network Service. Ustream. Twitter. Nike+iPod. Nintendo DSi with digital camera. Barak Obama as the U.S. President. “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”. “The Dark Knight”. “the Red Cliff”. Grand Theft Auto IV released.
■2011 “fake” Nagoya University project gallery “clas”
The act of “seeing” is such an attractive thing, the action quite often go far by itself. Talking eye-to-eye may be able to convey the truth, but the further the acton of seeing go apart from your own eyes, the more imagination gets in to mix the truth and falsehood, which quite often makes the experience even more attractive. The picture experience that started from camera obscura, now has grown into something like the sharing vision by ustream.
When a viewer looks into a hole in a box, he’ll see the silhouette of self covered in green projected, broadcasted live by ustream. There is a camera placed in the woods outside, pointed at the box with the viewer in the frame, and the image is projected inside another box. There are fake leaves placed in front of the camera, overlapping the green of the wood. Inside the other box, there is a camera with fake leaves attached as well, shooting at the image projected inside the box, of which the image is broadcasted live via ustream to another projector. The process is repeated and at the end the image reaches the first box which the viewer is looking into.
Keywords: Surveillance cameras, infiltration of ustream, release of the Nintendo 3DS

3.Collective projects
■2002 “the House of Dolls -from human shape to figurine-” Kyoto University of Art and Design Gallery Raku
A collaboration project with Mr. Amano Kazuo on exhibition of dolls. I took charge in contemporary figurines. Fashionable dress-up dolls targeted at adult women and action figures of movie stars, Tetsuwan Atom (Astro boy), made with realistic details to look like a real-life human boy, and Real dolls, created as a sex toy were some of the many dolls exhibited in the University museum.
Keywords: releases of the Xbox, Final Fantasy 11, human genome analysis completed (2003)
■2004 “project AYA” Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media
A collaboration with a French media performance director, Ms. Keiko Courdy. I performed as a system and visual interface creator and a chat actor. The story develops around the chat with the audience. It is a science fiction depicting the environment in the future, when human race has progressed into the space and the consciousness and the body are separated. It takes a form of a stage performance, but contains a lot of interactive factors, which allows other performers who shared the vision, DJ’s, VJ’s, chat actors and dancers to join in improvisational expression.
Keywords: P2P (the creator of Winny arrested), release of the Play Station Portable
■2006 “Net Water” renkon.org, Kyoto University of Art and Design, Xilinhot (China)
A collaboration workshop class with Ms. Keiko Courdy at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. I took charge in system operation and broadcasting from Mongolia. It was an installation/performance that connected an introverted man who lives in the neighborhood of where the workshop was held and an Inner Mongolian family that makes a living off of a traditional Mongolian folk art via video chat. The audience in the lecture hall can use a simple communication tool that utilizes the camera function of their mobile phone to guide the introverted man to contact the eldest daughter in Inner Mongolia.
Keywords: releases of Wii, PlayStation 3, Hikikomori (people withdrawing from the society) now counted up to 1.6 million (NHK Welfare Network research, 2005)