CONATUS / 私であることの試み
This exhibition, titled An Attempt at My Being / CONATUS, speculates a new equation of body = image = documentary, using the new media of VR. The artist Michibumi Ito considers images as objects and transforms them within the virtual dimension. He experimentally arranges desperate issues freshly recorded in sharp focus by being tangled with the physicality and perception empowered by the new media. The exhibition consists of works such as a film that presents an interview with Mr. Okabe who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and a piece contemplating ‘VR sleep’. Using his keyboard, Mr. Okabe can communicate with us for up to a few hours per day. And that would mean that he is spending his little time left on these few utterances. In a way, Mr. Okabe’s words strike a contrast with how we acquire endless new words, expressions, and countenance in our eyes in response to each new media every day. How did we come to show such swift contempt and simple mercy, while our words are no different that they could only be delivered visually? Consciousness or experience exchanged and shared every day in VR, SNS, or other roaring new media of some future--one can sense that it implies ontological abundance beyond the existing concept of the ‘virtual’. Surpassing the transaction and unification between virtual and real things, we may swim in the strait of devoiced words and their feel. Respectfully greeting the ethics of life, this exhibition maps and installs the plural topic of ‘body = image = documentary’. Like the faint reflections of sunlight leaking through the leaves, Ito tries to speak through his interview with Mr. Okabe. Humanity could be residing there. The title CONATUS refers to the ‘will to live’ or the ‘continuous effort to survive embedded in things’ nature’. Ito pays attention to Catherine Malabou’s ‘Plasticity’ and looks to the possibility of permutable subject. He thus attempts to approach and extend the imagination to what may lie beyond Mr. Okabe’s Conatus
Artworks
コナトゥスの目つきで / With the eyes of Conatus
View artworkThis work examines how it is possible to document the time created by the artist’s encounter with Okabe-san, a patient with an intractable disease, in the new medium of VR. Unlike the editing in which a single moment of time flows on a rectangular screen, which is often assumed to be a prerequisite for video, this work attempts to deconstruct contemporary vision and sense of time corrected by various devices by arranging images and texts as objects with variable shapes, positions, rotation, scale, and other aspects.
Times in Times
View artworkThis is a video work using 3DCG that concerns the dialogues and recollections of people in a virtual world who engage in the act of VR sleep. \n The work is sold together with a projector, which allows the purchaser to freely install the work along with the leaking light.
Artist
Michibumi Ito
Through images and installations using VR, Ito presents situations where physical laws--such as scale, distance, time, perception--language systems, and ways of perceiving the world could have been originally different. Based on the research on religion and pathology, he compares the virtual images created by the VR media with the ‘body’ and ‘I’ or ‘we’ that could have existed differently in the media environment surrounded by today’s internet, devices, and thoughts on the ethics of life. At Retopology Engine Lecture (2021, TIME MACHINE), he presented a VR in which the body transforms on a hammock-like housing into earthworms, fish, or organisms without forms, showing the body before and after human. At XipeTotec Reality (2021, PARCO Shibuya), he studied the ancient Aztec festival of wearing peeled off human skin to imitate the god of corn (Aztec Flaying ceremony) to satirize the current virtual worlds where people still wear ‘skins’ as their avatars.