Realistic Virtuality (Food Court) (2002)
CCD camera, video projector, motor, mixedmedia
Ryusuke Ito, who originally
came from the background in experimental filmmaking, gets to
the point of the concept about reality-and -beyond by juxtaposing
a miniature set of a shopping mall and its video-projected image
on live; someways, his work reminds us of behind-the-scene of
movie special effects. In this work, "Realistic Virtuality
(Food Court)", the miniature set belongs to three dimensional
world just like ourselves, of course, and video image belongs
to the artificial space on the wall (screen), however, the image
soon and overwhelmingly starts to insist its own existence as
super-reality; otherward original object loses the sense of the
reality.
Ryusuke Ito satirically titled the series of there work as "Realistic
Virtuality", not "Virtual Reality". He says that
he is very interested in daily, ordinary, but somehow vaguely
sinister scene like a shopping mall. In his food court, which
is originally artificial spaces being devoid of personality just
like same movie sets are all around the world, a video camera
repeats movement up and down and it gives to the live-image a
meaningless tilt-up/down effect, which should originally leads
audiences to be moved emotionally at the feature movies; the
mechanical movement of the camera rather emphasizes spookyness.
(Hisashi Shibata)