Virtual reality

 When I watched Holzer’s work at Toyota Municipal Museum of Art₃₈in Japan (Apr. 1996), I felt as if it were living. However it did not make sound. There were full of silence. It forced me not to stop reading the texts against the tiredness of my eyes. I felt pain (stimulation) in my eyes, but had a jouissance. It was a special experience of me to be in front of one work so long time that I never had.

I tried to find out her body, but I could not. I stopped seeking it because I knew she had never expressed her body in her work. But I found that her work specially LED representation seemed to have a body; it was a body as virtual reality, but not Holzer. And at the same time, I noticed her work was a mirror that reflects our real world and me. It is the time when we should do something for the world now. Because what I looked from her work’s reflection was the crisis of the human (me as well).

17 th . April 1996, a Japanese newspaper₃₉ introduced the article that announces the appearance of a virtual idol star to the media. “Now, by the spread of inter-net, imaginary shopping street and government only on the computer come into topics. As a fact, the virtual idol star will appear in any media next month. By the development of computer graphics technology, the field of virtual reality spread out surprisingly in these couple of years. The border line between real and fantasy become ambiguous more and more. But even it improves, it is only an assumption and imagination of the world. It has a danger of taking confusing to operate information because we easily forget the differences. ”

“She has a body (as a stimulation), voice, name and background. “DK96” was born at Fussa, Tokyo; is sixteen years old high school girl, 163 cm hight, grown up at US base and good at English and Dance.”

“In case of inter-net and personal computer, man can act a woman and we can change our “name”. It is possible to establish an imaginary myself.”₄₀

What virtual reality shows is that this exists only by a lot of signs. However we notice that we (human) also consist of these signs. Although human also has something out of sign. We have “bodies”.

We cannot escape from the contemporary world where we live. We should know what is going on now, and should think about our existence and the future vision of our world to maintain our lives as human.

Notes