Stand before the screen and flap your arms like a bird, and the silhouette projected on the screen flies up into the air. In this installation, what the participant feels is transferred to the small silhouette on the screen, resulting in a strange feeling of floating.

To fly on our own has been an eternal dream for humans. An action impossible in reality becomes a possibility within this limited space delineated by the tall and narrow screen in the installation. This work is sustained by self-awareness, that fundamental consciousness possessed by humans. The piece works based on the sensation that the small you in the image has turned into you. It is almost as though you have become the silhouette on the screen. In fact, we experience this kind of sensation of shamanistic possession in everyday life – for example, when you control a character in a computer game and feel like you have turned into that character, or when you feel like the curser on the screen has turned into our your fingertip.

Contemporary art has long become a world of hollow concepts and symbols that is separated from expression of consciousness itself. This work brings fundamental questions into relief, like what it means to be you, what can become yourself, and what new self human beings will obtain in the future. The artists want to return to the physical sensations of our own bodies, and from there embark on a thrilling challenge to find a new way of being for ourselves.

Tatsuya Saito, Tokyo University of the Arts