Media Art: Masaki Fujihata

     Bookchin and Shulgin define what Internet Art is while adding a humorous guideline on how to successfully achieve these listed standards.  After choosing your “mode” and “genre,” all the tools for navigating through the “self-defined” Internet Art world are ready to command you.  Specifically, these guidelines are created by “malfunctioning software.”  Is this where Bush and Benjamin Walter’s concluding statements about destruction as art come into play? “Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Benjamin).

     Working at the same university that Murakami Takashi graduated from, Masaki Fujihata is a professor in the department of Inter Media Art. Naturally, he is a media artist and also known as a “pioneer of Japanese new media art.” He creates work through computer graphics and animation. Interaction and “the reality of existence” is one of the main focuses in his work. According to his interview with International Symposium on Electronic Art, he ”was one of the first artists to use stereolithography, a technique in which a laser polymerizes a liquid resin as it sweeps its surface” (Yvonne, Masaki Fujihata, Simultaneous Echoes,107).

     As for Musaki Fujihata’s work, his concept revolves around the function and meaning of technology in society and how it defines humanity and our reality of existence. Also, the use of interactivity in his pieces draws his audience to explore or even test this questionable reality. Themes that appears in his work, quoted as “uselessness,” “existence,” and “imperfection” can relate to several difference areas of Japanese culture and even appear in the well-known Japanese artist, Murakami Takashi’s work. These topics can be related to the Japanese aesthetic of wabi and sabi. Although Murakami Takashi’s connection to these terms is much more complex, they both relate, even though Murakami’s work focuses on a Japanese sub-culture known as otaku . One of his recent interactive installation works from 2009 is called “Simultaneous Echoes.” For the project, GPS devices capture data and the information then is sent to composite video images. The audience is then able to control and view the 3D imagery through touching a disc. For this project, he collaborated with Frank Lyons to compose and organize sound. During the 1980’s, he began creating sculpture through computer generated processes. By the 90’s, he realized the importance of interactivity in digital works of art. One of his well-known, early interactive pieces, was Beyond the Pages where viewers used a pen to explore visual and verbal language in a virtual book.

     Next, the Polish, Piotr Szyhalski studied in several different mediums at the Academy of Visual Arts in Poznan. Piotr Szyhalski has similar themes as Musaki Fujihata with the importance of interactivity and existence in his pieces. Piotr Szyhalski’s work goes further to explore what is beyond our conscious existence and gives his audience an opportunity to explore that. A piece entitled, Ding an sich was commissioned by Gallery 9. He claims that within the 10 canons of this project, there is a variability in perception. He views the interactivity between the viewer and artist as “communication.”