Pacific Rim, occidentalism, Orientalism, imagining the Other, artistic strategies of the imagination The talk describes images, concepts and strategies that pre-modern artists in Japan and Europe used to "create" each other's worlds in their imagination. This material is the result of background research I did in Japan for my VR-installation The Travels of Mariko Horo, which will be exhibited in the festival.
Abstract How did map makers depict the unknown world? How did artists depict first contacts with new peoples? How did artists depict countries, peoples and cultures they could not visit? For 200 years from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s Japan shut herself off from the rest of the world. As European powers subjugated the rest of Asia, Japan allowed only a trickle of goods and knowledge from the Western world to enter the country. In both Japan and Europe, on the basis of very little information and a lot of imagination, a few artists created images of this most exotic "Other." In this lecture I present images, concepts and strategies that pre-modern artists used to create "the Other" in their imaginations. I collected this material on a Japan Foundation Fellowship during a residency at the Kyoto Art Center. It formed the artistic inspiration for my virtual reality installation The Travels of Mariko Horo, which will be exhibited at the ISEA festival. Further, I will demonstrate how I implemented this "imaginative strategy" directly in my piece, showing specific reference images from Asian and European iconography that influenced the piece, and how they were transformed in the final implementation of the artwork itself. Earlier versions of this talk have been given at the Kyoto Art Center (2003,) at MIT in the "Visualizing Cultures" class of Pulitzer Prize winning historian Professor John Dower, and at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (2005.) URLS:
old version of slides for "Constructing the Unknown World" The Travels of Mariko Horo website Tamiko Thiel CV |
