Field Work


'Masaki Fujihata Masaki Fujihata

One of the known advantages of photography emerges in its power to steal the view from a certain position. People call this technique shooting, recording or capturing. By splitting the image of one's view from its position, a recorded image itself starts to live in another direction. It permits anyone as the viewer to imagine all kinds of different stories, happenings, and truth. A recorded photograph can live in any different context. That's why we are so much attracted by old, anonymous, archive photographs.

In the Field-Work project, GPS technology and current digital video technology were combined to construct a pseudo-real space where one's view, captured by video would follow the position of its original movement. One's view is projected as a video frame and is moved following the wire frame G PS data with its original positions and orientations. The experience with this computer-generated virtual space gives us a strange impression which shifts the daily recognition of our common space to parallelize a model in real space and a real one in model space. It is inclusive/recursive reality.

The Field Work project consists of two separate parts: the workshop and the artistic work based upon it. The workshop is a collaborative undertaking with persons who live where the project is being conducted.

Individuals outfitted with special equipment wander across a particular territory. The GPS data of this hike are registered, precisely synchronized (with respect to time and position) with video recordings made by workshop participants during the hike, and saved. Following an initial viewing, the GPS tracks and videos of all workshop participants are merged together into an interactive system—real space and cyberspace. The artistic project based upon this will investigate various experimental ideas about time and space, image and movement, distance and proximity.

The exhibit will feature a stereoscopic projection that provides the user with a three-dimensional perspective of the collected data. In this cyberspace, video images move spatially along the three-dimensionally depicted G PS tracks and are thus displayed at the precise positions at which they were recorded.