Post from RICOH THETA. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
Oct 5 – 22, 2019
One summer, I stayed at the north part of Okinawa. One day, around the late afternoon, I went out to take a walk to a river which a local person suggested me to visit; “Water is so clear that you can see small fish and shrimps swimming.”
I stopped the car, went down a slope and found rocks, green trees and lukewarm water. It was a very quiet and beautiful place with sunlight falling. By the beautiful place I mean everything at that place worked precisely how it should work in a fine way. I could not find anything that is stagnant or ill.
Some parts of the river were shallow and the others were deep. The width was the same. Some parts were narrow and the others were wide. I enjoyed the river for a while; jumped off a rock, dived into it, floated, and followed the flow. Then I started to record images that appeared around myself using a camera while I walked upstream.
I can recognize some characteristics that stand out in the recorded images. I cannot tell how to separate the substance from other parts to which the characteristics belong. Although characteristics exist as one consecutive object, by creating boundaries to separate inside and outside, and ignoring everything outside, one can find meanings, significance or laws from things inside.
Taking photographs itself is an action of delimitating the region in a sense. On the contrary, recording images by a camera itself does not contain any purpose or necessities, but I can recognize some characteristics in the recorded images. At this moment, there are no objective guidelines or physical customs for separating the characteristics from the rest. Should I include singular or plural substances? How should the characteristics be formed; the image in front of me, the image on the surface of the river, or the image under water? I grab the characteristics by intuition and decide the boundary of the characteristics, inferring it based on their claim.
Colour was removed from the entire images as it seems information which color implies was not important to the characteristics. A color was then added uniformly because there was no demand for the characteristics to be black and white.
An image of the separated characteristics and a mirrored image made from the image are arranged vertically or horizontally. It looks like a false space appears.
Or, a part of an object which was flamed when it was recorded and another part of it are joined. Then It looks like a false space appears again.
By placing a false space and another false space side by side, it seems to imply the true characteristics.
I sense the true characteristics is the “reality”. The methodology of philosophy, including science, is naturally based on language as its basic medium. Thus it can prove human can’t touch reality but it can’t treat the reality itself. However, it seems that human naturally feel that kind of reality throughout its entire life. I believe the duty of art in 2019 and hereafter is to encourage social implementation of reality by the unique methodology that the only art can accomplish.