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A magic show to get you thinking

Angela Kelly
3/ 9/2008

VISITORS to the first major UK solo show by acclaimed Japanese artist Masaki Fujihata cannot expect to simply look.

The Conquest of Imperfection, now running at Cornerhouse, features eight installation works and prompts not only a reaction but interaction from onlookers.

This is a keynote of Fujihata – a pioneer of Japan’s new media art who began his career working in video and digital imaging in the early Eighties.

As an early practitioner of the application of new technologies to the process of artmaking, he was one of the first artists to use stereolithography.

This is a technique in which a laser creates a chemical reaction in a liquid resin as it sweeps its surface.

He also created the world’s smallest sculptures by using the manufacturing techniques for miniature electronic circuits. These works are visible only with a specialist microscope.

However, he is best known for his sophisticated interactive installations which use multimedia technology to look at the possibilities for communication in virtual spaces.

And his exhibition at Cornerhouse uses interactive technology, virtual reality and networking to probe the fundamental questions of human perception and awareness.

All the works here, created between 1995 and 2008, are characterised by a sense of playfulness requiring visitors to actively engage with them.

By doing this, they also have to think about how they perceive the world, even how to understand and experience their own existence. Unreflective Mirror, for example, forces visitors to question their own sense of identity by looking into a mirror with no reflection. And in Morel’s Panorama, viewers are made to question their perception of the world and their subjective view of it by a doubling of real time.

Projected images create a strange sense of space in the gallery, when visitors’ images are captured by a panoramic camera and projected on to the walls of the gallery, interspersed with recorded images of the artist himself. Fujihata has also created a new work especially for the Manchester exhibition.

Unformed Symbols: Another Side continues the artist’s longstanding investigation of perception and awareness, following a previous work recreating a card game using both real playing cards and animated projected images.

Another Side allows the viewer to play with images, using their fingertips to animate the fingerprint on the surface of the card.

The ‘fingerprint’ is both a trace of an individual and a testament of their existence. But is it also a record of their action?

Both works bring to mind the idea of magic and the sleight of hand tricks that make cards appear from magicians’ sleeves. Here, magic is replaced by the tricks that technology plays with our perception.

The Conquest of Imperfection runs until October 19. For more details visit www.cornerhouse.org or ring 200 1500.