Information

"MIRAGE" was performed in the Ars Electronica Festival 2014.

• Date4 - 7 September, 2014
• PlaceMariendom : The New Cathedral(LInz, Austria) Map
• URLhttp://www.aec.at/c/en/mirage/

Organized by

GRINDER-MAN

Co-organized by

Ars Electronica Linz

Collaborated with

RIKEN

Supported by

The Japan Foundation, Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)

About "MIRAGE"

An 8 minute immersive experience by traversing present and past.

"MIRAGE" is the first performing art ever in the world to experience with immersive. This experience reminds us that we generate ourselves at each moment in our highly subjective ambiguous world. This expression is created by a performance art group GRINDER-MAN based on the Substitutional Reality (SR) System an experience platform developed by RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan.

Unlike the general performing arts for the several audiences, "MIRAGE" is generated by the interaction of the two dancers and the one participant. As the participants, you are invited into an 8 minute immersive experience, using a head-mounted display fitted with headphones and a camera to capture live scenes.

While unaware of the participant, dancer in front of the eyes is changed over to the dancer that has been recorded in advance. In addition, by overlapping the live scene and recorded ones, participants will experience simultaneous past and present. It is very difficult to tell which dancer is really existing or which is not. Each participant will be required to discover their own "reality".

The aim of "MIRAGE" is to encourage you to establish yourself in such unique, uncertain world. Indeed, it obviously happens that they try to locate themselves with sensory information available during the performance, such as the feeling of airflow on the stage, the occasional touches of dancers, the vibrations of the floor, and subtle changes in illumination.

The first "MIRAGE" was performed at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (MIRAIKAN) in Japan on August 2012. The audience sat back on the seats behind the participants, and watched the dance performance. At the same time, they can see what participants were experiencing during the performance as the subjective views of the participants were projected on a screen next to the stage. They find out that multiple performances are going on at the same time in a same place. "MIRAGE" will also affect to recognize the reality of the audience not only participants.

CREDIT

Performance planning and direction

Hitoshi Taguchi(GRINDER-MAN)

Choreographer, Dancer

Makiko Izu (GRINDER-MAN), Taiju Matsumoto

Concept planning and development

Naotaka Fujii (RIKEN)

SR system design and development

Sohei Wakisaka (RIKEN)

SR system program support

Yu Okano (RIKEN), Takamitsu Hamajo (RIKEN), Junichi Nakano (buffer Renaiss), Michihiko Ueno, Naoto Noguchi, Seiya Takei

Music and sound design

evala (port, ATAK)

Lighting design

Yasuhiro Fujiwara

Production manager

Satoru Oyamada (Haletoke Inc.)

Technical director

Yutaka Endo (LUFTZUG)

About "SR system"

The Substitutional Reality system is an experience platform that blurs boundaries between live and past. It was developed by Laboratory for Adaptive Intelligence at RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. In contrast to the technologies "to assimilate virtual to real", which have been developed in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, the SR system manipulates "the users' subjective reality" itself by inserting the past seamlessly into the present.

A participant wears a head mounted display(HMD) fitted with headphones, a live camera and a head orientation sensor. Through the HMD, the participant can see the live scene from the own eye level camera, and the past scene which were recorded from the same point of view. When the live scene is seamlessly switched to past scene in this situation, the participant cannot recognize whether own experience is live or not.

Past scenes were recorded in advance by a panoramic video camera. By using the head orientation sensor, the participant can look around freely in the same condition as live view among the past view. Therefore, the participant subjective recognition itself cannot distinguish past from present, and it is contained in a linear sequence as a seamless experience.

Artist's profile