MARIKO MORI     The aspiration to create a utopian space or an ideal space is part of the history of civilization, and one can trace it back four thousand years. The Yumedono is the most ancient temple in Japan; it is a meditation center as well as a center for sutra studies. Actually, it's a "virtual" center, where all tensions can be overcome, and where one can liberate oneself from conflicts and worldly remains and attain the highest degree of self-contentment. Since the beginning of time every civilazation, Eastern and Western, has dreamed of the ideal place of Beauty and Purity, an imaginary space that is a non-place (ou-tópos) and a happy place (eû-tópos). In Western civilization, as in Eastern, the desire for perfection has always been associated with utopian aspirations and dream-visions.

GC     The utopian vision is associated with the formulation of an alternative universe that is difficult to grasp and to "physicalize," a virtual place, like the one created by present-day technology. In Dream Temple, too, you are trying to define ­ through the projection, inside the VisionDome, of a high-resolution video ­ an exemplary and in any case undefinable "world" as a metaphor for the human condition. It is a vision in which light is manifest as "illumination" in a labyrinthine journey without a destination, where only fragments and figures of light shines out. Why do you think that narrating something other with respect to consciousness requires the use of the new technologies of communication and creation?

MM      The relation to technology seems to me to be similar to the shamanistic vision that thinks in terms of transparent materials and gold in order to arrive at the definition of an ideal place. Technology, too, insists on defining what is absent, the unknown center hidden within us. Consciousness of the Whole has always been based on the speculative predictions that guide the search. Art and technology seek the new or the imminent future; they share the same anxieties and conditions, and aspire to resolve the essential problems of humanity. To come back to your mention of the utopian architecture of Ledoux and Boullée, it seems clear that those "dreamers" thought they were building according to technologies that did not yet exist. The plans to build pantheon-like or spherical constructions ­ like cities of the sun or of light ­ were conceptual, of course, but they also anticipated building technologies that today make them feasible. In this sense, the development of technology seems linked with the desire to make human utopias possible. Indeed, the idea of a utopian place was the real impulse behind technological development. The absence of place, and the good or happy place, thus coincide; and I am not talking about the holy place or the "other" place ­ thus neither Civitas Dei nor Platonic Republic ­ but rather about a projective, exemplary construction strongly invested in the formulation of the self as individual and society, according to Thomas More's definition. Technology is the unending search for both an eternal loss and an eternal present. The non-place is also related to the idea of death, or rather of the beyond-death. From this arise the ideas of utopia as a hellish or heavenly non-place, specter of a ruin and a threat, or of a reward and a remuneration for existence. After death, the usual definitions fall apart; everything loses value and cannot be transformed into an element of exchange. It is a condition in which one is mirrored in a nowhereŠonce again, utopia.

GC     In representing these coordinates of thought and action, how do you manage to control the effects of collision between Western and Eastern cultures? The scene of your artistic activity shifts back and forth between New York and Tokyo; you are endlessly involved in peregrinations between objects and signs of contrasting or at least complementary civilizations. Is it easy to reconcile the East's discourse on the inner with the West's discourse on the outer and their respective visions of life and death?

MM     There are many shared views (that of heavenly space and nirvana) even though a different conception of death remains: in Buddhist thought, there is the endless cycle of reincarnation, while in the Western thought, death precludes any other life except the one associated with the judgement of a higher force. For me, however, judgement is only internal, can only be made by oneself. It is unthinkable that someone else could judge you. That is why I am inable to conceive of a place of control and a center. It is an utterly chaotic and open condition. Something similar to Karma. A reality with several dimensions in which the concepts of destiny and foresight are interwoven, as is the case, for example, with certain Aborigine tribes in Australia ­ such as the Maihan ­ who are able to predict the future, and thus can resolve the problems of life.
Similarly, one may assume a Freudian or a Kantian perspective ­ that is, a search for consciousness and awareness. Buddhism tries to see beyond consciousness, as if into nothingness, the void. My point of view is neither religious nor psychoanalytic, neither nihilistic nor Christian. My awareness is my reality, and every reality exists in it.

GC     Is art an instrument of awareness? Does it serve to bring out, directly or in mediated fashion, through an object or construction, a gesture or word, the status of a being in the world? Does it represent the multiplicity of being or of self-knowledge?

MM     The idea for Dream Temple stems from the desire to immerse myself more and more in consciousness, the central core of the work. It is like reaching a subterranean level of awareness, such as when philosophers speak of a subconscious experience of reality. By using technology and a spherical projection I am trying to submerge the observer in a utopian space, a placeless space, trying to realize a spherical architectural design. At the same time I am commited to giving shape to my imagination, or better yet, to the idea of consciousness such as I imagine it, to immerse myself in it and look inside it. This is what I am trying to communicate inside the Dream Temple.

GC     Technology is an impersonal vision; it's indiscreet, indifferent eye can enter into your inner vision, your mind, into that submerged universe that Wassily Kandinsky tried to "describe" in The Spiritual in Art. In fact, your spherical projections, despite their utterly contemporary dynamics and quest for light and effects, are very close to the universe of the Russian abstractionist. Perhaps his vision was only projective, whereas your efforts tend toward the definition of a "visual womb" that might function as a place of germination, as though the figures moving on the surface could lead, through the transmutation of forms and colors, to a transmutation of the self, beyond any threshold of life and death.

MM     Visualization by means of technology ­ as in computer-graphics and virtual reality systems ­ helps me to concretize a space in which it might become possible, through a visual and auditory experience, to look inside oneself: a meditative space. It is all derived from my imagination, from my way of perceiving the whole universe.

GC     Your entire artistic itinerary seems directed toward achieving an awareness of your own existence as a woman in a context ­ that of contemporary Japan ­ which oscillates between tradition and extreme experimentation.
Starting with your earliest works ­ such as Subway (1994), Play with Me (1994), Tea Ceremony III (1995), and Birth of a Star (1995) ­ the mirroring of your personal and social condition as a woman in a specific society was an instrument of germination and growing awareness. Then you moved from the person to the places, which you treated as metaphores of an encounter between contrasting or double universes, represented in the grafting of different realities ­ as with the mermaid in Empty Dream (1995) ­ and extending from existence to the limits of the real, as in Miko no Inori (1996). And from this you came to Nirvana (1996-1997), in which the reconstruction of the fusion of different and contrasting entities led you to represent yourself as a flying divinity, wearing a kimono made of artificial and industrial fabrics, as if your identity was born of the harmonious fusion of the sacred and the technological.

MM     The clothes represent the skin, the shelf of an individual; they are like an expression of my identity and ideas.

GC     Finally, after making a journey to unknown, magical lands such as those evoked in Entropy of Love (1996), Burning Desire (1996-1998), and Kumano (1997-1998) ­ which seem to be attempts to reconstruct the environmental and historical genealogy of your position in the world ­ with Dream Temple you distance yourself from "the spectacle of yourself" and try to outline an architectural language through which it would be possible to "enter" your stream of consciousness, which no longer involves figures or landscapes, but pure, ideal images.

MM     I fundamentally believe in individuality and self-discovery. However, my identity cannot be separated from my social existence. But neither does that meen I'm bound to it, or to any political or religious structure. In Nirvana, I drew inspiration from the Buddhist iconography of the flying angel and made it contemporary, in Kumano, I was interested in erasing the boundaries between present, past and future, in transcending time and space. In both cases I was interested in concretizing the eternal present in order to go into and come out of my past and my history, as represented by my DNA, and to define my present existence by "excavating" this past and this history. The two works deal with the visualization of a symbolic and cultural purity. Even when I refer back to the history of art, I am interested in circulating past iconography in the present in order to get to the future.

GC     The frames of reference you've used thus far are the usual ones: figure and landscape, symbols and iconsŠ What was your inspiration for the contents of Dream Temple's sphere?

MM Once again, I chose familiar images. I concentrated my attention on human fetuses, on the maternal womb, but also on monkey fetuses. The forms all seemed constructed in the same way. Before arriving at the form, however, I thought about what their consciousness might have been inside a womb. This was the starting point for the spherical projection.

GC     What allusions are there to temple architecture?

MM     The references to the Yumedono of Horyuji are both formal and symbolic in nature ­ for example the octagonal structure and the ornaments that bring into communication the earthly and heavenly dimensions, sky and land, inside and outside. These elements may reach back into the past and may belong to much more ancient cultures, just as they may also come into the present and spill over into the future. Since they can only look at the present, I thought it was important to revive ancient, traditional motifs and make them current, if not project them into the future, as I did using materials like the dichroic glass. I like the idea of an "eternal present"; and I'm interested in using technologies such as virtual reality in treating this theme, because it allows me to take an ancient element and make it "eternally present".

GC     The concretization, through images, of a universe of consciousness, such as that which we find inside Dream Temple, is certainly more than just an outward projection of your state of mind or your search for spirituality in images. Can it therefore be seen as a symptom of other identities or other quests for consciousness?

MM     I don't like at all the idea of putting myself at the center of a work, even if I've used myself in my work. The idea was about a being or person who can believe only in her own consciousness, and therefore visualizes and expresses it. This complex universe of figures and signs, of movements and colors, took on the form of the vision you find in 4'44". In the first minute I tried to reconstruct the images of an immersion that would lead to the fundamental notions of forms of life, and even deeper. It's like looking at fifty million different DNA samples to find out what a human being is and never managing to grasp the definition. Or else looking deep inside an atom or quark to find out what a human being is. Treating human consciousness is an extremely complex matter, and that's why I've tried to approach a broader subject, life itself. I am always wondering why I am here and thinking that I will die because I am living. I am always looking for relationships between my existence and total existence, connections between here and elsewhere.

GC      In your earlier works, the body and the natural landscape were privileged signifiers that presented themselves as accessible, identifiable subjects. The imaginary investments of your person were able to provoke interpretations and even produce a different sensitivity to the urban and environmental scene. It was almost as if your body served to create a relationship of amazement that laid bare the past and contemporary intensities of a person, a young woman, in a society first confined to the Eastern sphere and then wandering through the world. Do you think that, having evolued into the definition of a non-place such as that of 4'44", the zone of suspension and abstraction will no longer allow for any corporeality other than that of the person perceiving and thus becoming the subject?

MM      It's more than a detachment from one's own body.

GC     Is the use of glass, with its allusion to immateriality and transparency, derived from this search for a bodiless condition? Is the iridiscent surface a metaphor of ungraspability and movement?

MM      I insisted on using dichroic glass, which has a changing, iridescent surface, because it is closer to the idea of consciousness, which changes every second, every instant. Moreover, it's a material that defies definition in terms of its chromatic components: one cannot define color, just as one cannot define consciousness. The colors are incessantly changing, if you look at them from different angles. Sometimes you see them, sometimes you don't. Dichroic glass is also transparent, and I believe in fact that the inside and the outside come into contact, just as I believe that every consciousness can connect with another or with all the consciousnesses in the world.

GC      If one looks at the Dream Temple as a metaphor for the human body, one may speak of the carnal and spiritual components, except that the epidermal surface is transparent, as though it wanted to show its inside, which is a kind of perfect entity represented by the sphere, a symbol of absoluteness and perfection. In addition to the temple of Horyuij, founded by prince Shotoku in 607, there is the reltionship between the darkness ­ in which one glimpses the gilded statue of Guze Kannon, and therefore a kind of symbolic luminosity ­ and the brightness that greets the visitor who enters your Dream Temple, who is "illuminated" by digital vision. Thus a process that in ancient times was secret and enigmatic, can today be made manifest, visualized in its "virtuality", through virtual reality.

MM      Light can be seen only when there is darkness. That's Taoism and Yin and Yang, which involve the existence of complementary opposites, positive and negative, darkness and light. For the images created with computer-graphics I worked a lot on the dialectics between darkness and light. It's a relationship that harks back to my past experience as well, when at age 9 I visited the cathedrals of Europe, which don't have much light inside, since the light is filtered through stained glass. In my work I've always emphasized the importance of light and illumination, both in a physical and metaphysical sense.

GC     The use of light in Japanese architecture is part of the purification process that leads to the construction of "ideal" buildings. This is why the pagodas and temples are raised up from the ground, so that one only has access to them from stairs, which are almost always symbolic in number; and their idea can be continually re-created, since it lives and dies, being constantly renewed and reborn. Light is a vehicle for purity, except that in the East is isn't "directed", as in Western churches , but rather diffuse and omnipresent.

MM     Japanese architecture treats light in a different way. In traditional houses, the walls and windows filter light through paper partitions, reducing its impact, absorbing and diffusing it in the interior space, though not in large quantity. Even inside the temples it's almost always dark, and you need candles to see the figure of the Buddha. Obviously, in Dream Temple, the use of glass allows the light to travel through the walls, but the idea is that it is possible only to see the light, one's "own" light. That is why it's an architecture of light: because it inhabits light and participates in a "total" light, becoming part of an "enlightenment". The transition from light to darkness is treated in the same manner as that from emptiness to fullness, or from silence to sound.

GC     For you, light means enlightenment, bringing out the spiritual value, the relationship between inner and outer light. This is why one must be immersed in it. Is this the source of the construction of the sphere and the curved projection?

MM      If it was linear you would percieve a division. In the sphere, however, there is no division; it presents itself as limitless. There is no boundary between here and there, nor is there any conception of border: the sphere is an infinite, limitless space.

CG     Once again, what relationship is there between history and religious thought?

MM     According to the Buddhist vision, enlightenment can pass through the body. But, not being perfect, the body does not allow a total transmutation. The reincarnation process is part of this process, which is endlessly circular, forever being reborn. According to Buddhist philosophy, reaching the Karmic dimension, attaining Nirvana, means no longer being reborn, breaking the cylce of rebirth. Not wanting to fall into mere illustration of religious theories, I resolve to create a meditative space, in which every person might look at himself. Enlightenment must involve both body and consciousness, and in Dream Temple I have tried to approach a dimension of connection with both. I have tried to create a contact both with the microscopic and the macroscopic, with the space of another dimension, where the particular is everything and the present is eternal. •
 
 
from: Mariko Mori: Dream Temple, Fondazione Prada - Milan, 1999