2pm Wednesday 25 June

Seminar Room, 2F Nam June Paik Art Center

Masaki Fujihata

Satellite broadcasts changed a perception of the world, and the changing consciousness about the distance in spatiotemporal terms also exploded cultural geography, causing different cross-cultural interactions to be sought after. In the same vein Paik’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell came out of a reflection on how to create a new way of global communication, and this resonates well with Masaki Fujihata’s work. Fujihata defines media art, not necessarily as an art form to make use of a new medium but to create one. He employs networked digital technologies, particularly GPS(Global Positioning System), and his works like Voices of Aliveness and Simultaneous Echoes combine video images, musical elements, interviews, and locational data captured by GPS. These are made available for viewers to interactively explore and experience the differences between realities perceived physically and virtually. In this talk, Fujihata will draw on the participatory Field Works he has been doing for more than twenty years and discuss how GPS serves him for his collaborative projects connecting with communities across the globe and documenting the process of engagement. His work will afford much food for thought as mobile devices with satellite navigation are becoming increasingly ubiquitous today such that they are almost like our body parts.

Masaki Fujihata (1956~) is professor in the Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of Arts. As a pioneering media artist, he employs multimedia technologies creating virtual spaces to examine new possibilities for interaction and communication. His works include Removable Reality (1992), a collaborative project with Kei’ichi Irie, which used an infrared cordless phone, and Impressing Velocity (1994), in which he used a laptop computer equipped with GPS to digitally map Mount Fuji, and ongoing project Field Works (1992~) which reconstructs collective memories into cyberspace as a video archive indexed with GPS data. Fujihata has exhibited extensively throughout Japan and internationally, and he was granted Award of Distinction in Ars Electronica in 2013 for his project Voices of Aliveness.

N/A, but booking essential (on a first-come, first-served basis, 60 seats available per event)
* NJPAC complimentary exhibition tickets will be offered to those who attend the event.

by email (reservation@njpartcenter.kr) ※ Please make sure that your email has the subject heading of ‘Paik-Orwell Club booking’ and the following information: name, institution, telephone number, and event title. Text messages will be sent to confirm your booking.

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