Amid the anxiety of the ongoing spread of the coronavirus, I wanted to portray this era in a positive light by expressing how beautiful everyday life and each person’s life can be. Rather than using unnatural direction more typical of dramas or films, I aimed for a style that felt as natural as possible. Instead of a stereotypical “TOKYO,” I was very particular about the locations, composition, and color palette so that it would feel real and captivating. My belief is that beauty does not lie only in glamorous, meticulously crafted worlds; any world can become beautiful depending on the perspective or the way it is framed.

At MUTEK.JP 2021, I created and presented an audiovisual performance work based on a VR game. By playing the VR game, sounds placed within the space are triggered through physical interaction and programming, constructing a piece of music. This work emerges through the complex layering of multiple media—body, space, as well as visual and sonic elements. == Title: “Being There” This work is an immersive game art piece utilizing virtual reality, and adopts performance as its mode of presentation. By having the performer (the artist themself) or the audience actually play the game, the system generates interactive environmental sounds such as physical collisions within the virtual space. As multiple generated “sounds” overlap, they become an accidental “music.” The sound is influenced by post-classical music and contemporary experimental music. It departs from Western-centric music based on elements such as rhythm, melody, and harmony that we often encounter in daily life, and creates a new state of music. The keywords of the story I want to convey through this work are, as the title suggests, “existence” and “role.” We are born into organizations, communities, and other structures, and are made to feel that our presence in society is acknowledged as content that is given a role and embodies it. But isn’t the fact that a person exists itself a kind of miracle, one that only appears through the combination of countless natural scientific phenomena? As the VR game progresses, the hierarchical relationship between player and avatar gradually collapses. By temporarily freeing us from fixed roles and assumptions, it expresses an attitude of affirming “to be there, and to exist simply by being there.” Unlike the formalized, so-called cool sound and visuals of conventional audiovisual works, this piece, which reexamines the form itself, may at first seem raw or unsophisticated. But that is precisely what makes it a representation that affirms existence. This is a multimedia work that appeals to the nature of human existence by combining body, music, imagery, performance, and poetry.