Inter-Action
Since prehistoric times, paintings have been a magical technology that traverses between the two-dimensional plane and the three-dimensional space-time, expressing how we humans open ourselves to the world and our views of the universe and civilization at any given time. Therefore, it was perhaps inevitable that the modern era, which attempted to bring the world under human control as an object that could be analyzed and manipulated, began to critically reconsider the art of painting, which wavers ambiguously between the real (two-dimensional) and the illusory (three-dimensional).
The adventures of modernist painting, including both a materialistic viewpoint and an anti-modern attitude, and including all kinds of responses to the drastically changing civilization, led in some places to the reduction of illusion to a material existence of zero degrees. In other places, it reaches the nihilism of the symbolic transaction that made Andy Warhol say, “There is nothing behind the symbols”. Is the true nature of the paintings whose veils have been lifted the ultimate otherness of this world that is incompatible with our own, the absolute disconnection between human beings and things?
As we are now entering the quarter century of the 21st century, we are living in an age in which things have greatly surpassed people. Science and mathematics have revealed that the events of this world had a dynamism that defied analysis, reduction, prediction, and manipulation, and the never-ending natural disasters and political, economic, and social turmoil have shattered the modern illusion that the progress of civilization will solve everything. Technology, once a tool for controlling the world, has rather escaped human control and is becoming an entity that is greatly shaking our sense of ethics and even our raison d'etre.
Now that the mission of humans to dominate things has failed, and the world's otherness toward humans has begun to bite us, in order to survive in an uncontrollable world, humans must search for a new relationship to reconcile with the world. At that time, the story of modernist painting, once reduced to the extremity of objects, may begin to spin out as the next journey of painting that explores a new way of opening oneself to the world, crossing the border from objects to people and from people to objects.
This project began with a return to the most fundamental structure of painting, the crossing from the nth dimension to the (n+1)-the existence of the “other side” of more than three dimensions through our perception on the plane that exists as two dimensions on the “this side. The two-dimensional planes of the paintings, which contain more than three dimensions of space-time, are converted to three dimensions on a meta-level as three-dimensional sculptures, and further developed into (3+1)-dimensional kinetic installations with a time axis by giving them movement through motors. By transforming the paintings into three dimensions on a meta-level, and then giving them motors to move them, they develop into a (3+1) dimensional kinetic installation with a time axis, inflating the dimensions on both “the other side” and “this side” of the paintings. How will the movement on “this side” of the painting relate to the illusions generated on “the other side”?
In this installation, a group of paintings floating in midair changes its position in response to the viewer's movements, using sensors that react to human movement. 10 sensors, 10 robotic arms, and 7 painting units suspended by the sensors create a complex and unpredictable dynamic network. The behavior of the seven painted units, which are suspended from a complex and unpredictable dynamic network, automatically changes the interplay of shapes and colors without the creator's control.
The behavior of this complex network, however, occurs only when the paintings react to human beings, and this interaction between “this side” of the painting and “the other side” of the painting is established. It is our perceptual experience that makes the interaction between “this side” and “the other side” of the paintings possible.
What unfolds there is the endless generation of events that are neither controlled by us nor by them, but are established by us and them actively interacting with each other.
In the relationship between people and things, this side and that side, humans and the world, we humans may indeed have failed to assume a dominant position over them. However, we can still reestablish a creative “complicity” with them, which is unpredictable and unmanageable.
Based on the statement for the solo show in 2023 "Inter-Action"
Okubo Takahiro