This collaborative installation by architect IRIE Kei'ichi and computer artist FUJIHATA Masaki explores the age of electronic information to present us with a completely new sensibility.
Basically, art is an act of peering in on the impossible feat of making an invisible reality visible. In an era that faces a major turning point in our grasp of reality due to advances in media technology, however, this installation aimed to foreshadow this “invisible reality” as a new sensibility by turning the obvious on its head.
Visitors are equipped with infrared headphones that pick up more than 20 different kinds of sound programs within the exhibition site. Participants wander freely through the exhibition site, listening to sounds and messages that differ according to where they are walking. In other words, as they move from one space to another, the visitors are involuntarily selecting the information they will receive.
At the “Entrance Zone,” three urethane foam columns react to the entrance of each visitor, thereby changing the screen image in the “Inverted Cone Installation Zone.”
The “Entrance Zone” is followed by the “Glass Installation Zone,” a passageway made from reinforced glass that slants sideways. This space is composed of sounds from 15 channels. Different sound messages that include sound effects created stereophonically are heard by each visitor according to where they walk.
Next is the “Inverted Cone Installation Zone” which takes the form of a huge mortar bowl within which two images are projected, creating an extraordinary experience for the visitor. One image is taken from the very top of the entrance columns and then partially enlarged, giving the visitor a strange sensation of the space fusing together with sounds and images seen somewhere before. Following this live image, a different CG image goes to work. In this CG, a spherical three-dimensional image of Spiral Hall (an exhibition space), IRIE, and FUJIHATA is projected so that the visitors experience the separation of their senses of sight, hearing, and touch.
These previously unknown realities personally experienced by each visitor are all original collaborations between the artist and audience.
Finally, one reaches the “Exit Zone,” which features a wall from which the shape of a person with arms raised in the “banzai” gesture has been cut out. After passing through this cut-out figure, the visitor removes the headphones and leaves the world of an unknown reality attained through the installation to return to the real world.
This installation was able to offer important clues toward the search for a new reality in this era of increasingly complex and advanced media technology.