Click to watch High Quality Video -- Click to view images from Sotsuten

Sotsuten, my BFA Thesis Exhibition, opened on 4/14/07 and ran through 4/19/07 at the Burke Museum of Art in Granville, Ohio. The installation involved the use of multiple video and rapid imagery projections through thin, translucent material in addition to live camera footage and two-way mirrors. Like much of my two-dimensional artwork, Sotsuten was inspired by my experiences from living in Tokyo, Japan.

While I lived in Tokyo studying at Waseda University, I spent four hours a day commuting to and from school. Such a lengthy commute is not uncommon for people living and working in Tokyo. The long commute, coupled with long work hours and forced socializing with co-workers after work, means that many Japanese workers do not return home until very late at night and have little time, if any, to spend with their families. This was the case in my host family. My host father woke up early in the morning in order to catch the train in to work, and would not return until 11:00 or 12:00 at night. Often I would not see him at all during the week.

We all need time to unwind, and when people are not able to find the time to relax in the comfort of their homes, they must find other places to do so out in the public realm. Many people, including myself, found the long train rides a very good place to do this. It is the perfect opportunity to catch up on lost sleep, read a book, write text messages on their cell-phones, or just zone-out. Unlike the subways in New York and other American cities which I have in my visits found to be a very hostile and uncomfortable environment, the trains in Japan are clean and rather quiet. People tend not to make eye contact with each other and, tend one way or another, to retreat into their own private worlds.

However, these private spaces are ultimately within the greater public space of the train car. Far from being typical personal spaces, commuters are often crammed into the train cars and pushed up against each other in order to fit as many people in as possible. However, people still manage to retreat into their own worlds and tune out the bustle and crowded space around them.

Inspired by this, I wanted my audience to experience first-hand how people create their private spaces within public space. In order to accomplish this, I turned the exhibition space as a whole into an archetypal public space through the use of projected video and sound. Within this public space, there are smaller private spaces created by one-way mirrored plastic and smaller video screens.

In order to recreate the feeling of the crowded public space, I projected video footage of crowded public places in Tokyo, such as train stations, the city-streets, etc. The video was projected through hanging plastic sheets that were staggered in space so that they not only broke up the projected image, but also allowed it to fill the space. The plastic was translucent, so it allowed the image to pass through onto subsequent sheets while still holding the image on its surface. On select sheets of plastic, I silkscreened layers of signage and tickets in order to create a rich surface to project onto. The projected images mix with the silkscreened text which in turn blocks out the light and causes the image to be further distorted by the shadows created from the ink. The repeated tickets and signs allude to the masses of people in the transit system which controls them through the numerous signs telling them what to do.

The videos were a series of stop-frame animations created by taking a number of still photographs from a single vantage point across a span of time and then playing them rapidly in sequence. The effect is a fast, jerky motion that shows the busy movement of people and objects in the environment. Each animation only lasted a few seconds and quickly switches out to another random animation sequence. Four projectors, one in each of the four corners of the room, ensured that the images overlap as they are projected on the plastic, contributing to the feeling of crowding and movement in the public space. Each projector had a bank of 35 unique video clips it can choose from, each about 12 frames, which translated into over 1,600 images being projected in the exhibition space.

The private space within the public exhibition space was created by hanging sheets of one-way mirrored plastic. These sheets of plastic formed a rectangular space the viewer could enter. In that space was a suspended video screen that displayed footage of commuters creating their own personal spaces while riding on the train. The source of this video was footage I took with a miniature camera mounted in a backpack that I placed above the luggage racks on the trains. The camera was positioned so that it was over-head looking down on people as they rode the train, providing a small window into the personal world created by the Tokyo commuters. In addition, a similar miniature camera observed the viewers from its resting place above the viewer’s head on a rack of conduit which mimics the luggage racks on the trains. As the viewer looked into the world of the other person, their own image was captured from a similar vantage point and was intermittently fed to the video monitor, which softly faded between the recorded video and live video. This highlighted the relationship between the viewer and the person they were watching as both exist within/create private worlds within the greater public space.

Furthermore, the mirrored plastic that formed the space allowed people outside to look inside, but the inside of the plastic was slightly mirrored allowing viewers to see their own reflections. Just as they were peering into the private world of the people on the video monitor, the viewer was also being watched by the other people in the public gallery space.  

 

© Copyright 2007 Matthew Messmer. All Rights Reserved