Visitors sitting in a chair wearing a head-mounted display and headphones can see themselves in a large, mirror-like screen in front of them. From there, a dancer quickly takes them on a tour around various places different from the “here and now.” The assumed mirror images on the screen certainly show the persons on the chair, but the time lag between the visitors’ movements and those of their “mirror images” distorts the recognition of what they see, and thereby creates a sense of disconnection of body and mind. As the boundary between real and virtual environments is blurred, visitors become unable to distinguish reality from fiction.

Substitutional Reality (SR) is a system developed by the RIKEN Brain Science Institute’s Laboratory for Adaptive Intelligence. Different from previously known technologies aiming to “narrow the gap between virtual and real,” such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), SR eliminates the borderline between reality and virtuality by including aspects of the past as something contiguous to the present, and thus affects “reality” itself as it is subjectively experienced by each individual person.

Duration ca. 8 minutes

FUJII Naotaka + GRINDER-MAN + evala

Collaborative project aimed at the production of new interactive performances utilizing the Substitutional Reality (SR) system developed at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. Initially launched by FUJII and GRINDER-MAN member TAGUCHI Hitoshi after performing together in 2011, the project has so far yielded the immersive performance piece “MIRAGE” (2012).