DARK, 2025 — Tokyo
This work represents the third expression of my experience of mainly inhabiting a virtual world while simultaneously desiring something fundamentally physical, something anchored and substantial. These three works (out of office, between pixels and particles and DARK) have been produced in Japan, and each think about a sense of belonging. It is an attempt to locate a place of belonging between the digital and the physical, and within Japan itself, a country which, after five years, remains in many respects foreign to me. [IMAGE:0.8265158810595715] The exhibition is titled DARK, a name that came after my trip to Nagano in the summer of 2024, where I encountered an enthusiast who attracts moths in the hot Japanese mountain nights. I was amazed by the diversity of moths I saw during one evening. To explain the method, a white cloth and reflective material are set up with strong white lights and UV lights tuned to the appropriate spectrum. When the sun sets, the installation is left to run and moths begin to gather. According to recorded data, Japan is home to over six thousand moth species, many of which inhabit mountainous regions.[IMAGE:0.25697317171205125]I found myself moved by the sheer number of moths, by their forms and diversity . That sense of life and multiplicity stayed with me for the year to come . It led to a question of whether such life could coexist with a digital reality or whether it would be irrelevant. The moths embodied both attraction and extinction, drawn to light that reveals and destroys at the same time. Their movement reflected the condition of digital perception, which makes things visible while detaching them from duration. This became the point of departure for the work. As with the earlier projects in this series, the process began with the need to go outward. The first project, Out of Office, was a bicycle journey from Kyoto to Tokyo, a movement through landscape and distance. In DARK, this gesture evolved into an engagement with the outdoors and the night itself. It became about perception in low visibility, of how attention adjusts when surrounded by darkness, sound, and the uncertainty of form. [IMAGE:0.7458363276915876] In this work I sought to merge the physical and the digital more completely. The CAVE gallery, located in a basement space in Tokyo, was reconstructed within a digital environment where the ceiling no longer existed. The physical room remained closed and grounded, while its virtual counterpart extended into an open void. Every element in the installation existed in correspondence, forming a continuous relation between material and immaterial conditions. The charcoal left from a fire I made in the “real world”interacted with the digital world, where the fire continued to burn. The two systems unfolded at different speeds, creating a layered sense of time in which presence and memory overlapped. [IMAGE:0.016110145639690487] At the center of the installation hung a suspended roof-like structure. Beneath it a simple futon. The canopy in the physical space acted as protection from the rain falling in the digital one. Visitors could sit beneath it, aware of two simultaneous climates, one experienced and one projected. The sound of that rain, recorded on a warm summer night, filled the room through speakers. On the translucent plastic roof sheets lay oranges, while the tree they came from existed only in the digital environment, moving in simulated wind and rain. The scene existed both as recollection and as projection, suggesting that perception itself becomes a site of translation. [IMAGE:0.3214221943853087] Under the canopy, visitors could sit and use a game controller to walk through the projected three-dimensional space, exploring the interrelations between physical and digital realities. The projector illuminated large parts of the gallery, while small mirrors positioned throughout the space reflected and scattered fragments of the projected image across walls, floor, and ceiling. Each reflection altered the image slightly, producing new arrangements in which representation and presence folded into each other. [IMAGE:0.35932490486213] The space was filled with butterflies, insects of the day, meeting the moths of the night that I photographed in Nagano. Their encounter between light and darkness introduced a temporal dimension that became central to the work. It suggested that perception itself is stretched between day and night, between what appears and what disappears. Photographs of a garden at night intertwined with digital renderings of fruit, forming a condition in which the real and the virtual coexist, overlapping rather than opposing one another. [IMAGE:0.6118459128951385]
