Vurtual Mementos Association
Apr. 16th Tue– Apr. 27th Sat, 2024
12:00~18:00 (Monday closed)
KG＋
https://kgplus.kyotographie.jp/exhibitions/2024/uchida-seira/
▶︎▶︎▶︎Reservation:Virtusl Mementos Association
Virtual Mementos Association” is a series of installations that allows visitors to experience an “imaginary faith that might be possible” in today’s world where flaming and divisions by algorithms create social issues. In creating this work, Uchida researched the interactions between people and the invisible deceased through offering objects in the Jizo faith in Aomori, Japan. And then she converted it to a method that imagines the invisible others of today – people divided by algorithms. The transformation of memorial items into 3D objects is done through photogrammetry, a technique that synthesizes large numbers of photographs into three-dimensional objects. The data is made available for downloading and used as a part of other games to intervene in the process of creating stories in the future(she calls the process as reincarnation of the objects), thus exploring the nature of contemporary photography and the distribution and value of memory. In this series, the story and VR space change according to the exhibition space, and a new version of the story will be told in this exhibition as well.
<Seira UCHIDA Profile>
Artist/researcher, Seira Uchida graduated from the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences’ (IAMAS) master’s degree program. She identifies herself as a “bender” in the post-internet era. Her work focuses on the re-telling and distribution of stories in the post-Internet era and later. While incorporating services such as Amazon and YouTube, Uchida questions normative values and narratives. In recent years, based on her research in folklore and beliefs, she has been working on applying the functions of these cultures into the modern lifestyle by using technologies such as VR and the internet. Major works include “Marginal Bookstore,” which revalues and re-distributes used books as one-of-a-kind items, and the “Virtual Mementos Association(VMA),” which uses VR and 3D scanning to offer up items that cannot be thrown away.
