First draft: The cursor is the switchover entity between the real and the virtual: Two works about the cursor by exonemo

This article examines the representation of the cursor in the Graphical User Interface. We often look the cursor as an expanding of our hand or the double of the pointing device like the mouse. Although the cursor on the display has been familier with us since the desktop metaphor, ‘↑’ has no correspondance with the real thing, such as the file or folder. Moreover, the cursor does not obey the physical law because it is in the cyber space. Therefore, we are familier with the cursor, but we don’t know anything about ‘↑’.

exonemo receives the unidentifiable of the cursor and considers the cursor as a halfway being: This means that the cursor is A, also it is B. This idea leads us to new understand of the cursor, therefore I focus on their two works, DanmatsuMouse (2007) and ↑ (2010) in order to explain what an essence of the cursor is. These two works make clear that the cursor is the switchover entity which makes the ‘between’ the real world and the virtual world, then switches from the real to the virtual, or vice versa.

First draft:A ‘plane’ on Masaki Fujihata’s works: Gravity/Projection/Overlapping

Masaki Fujihata is know as one the famous media artist. Although almost all people think that Fujihata’s work is interactive, Unformed Symbols (2006) is not an interactive work, just an animation one. Fujihata’s early work Forbidden Fruites is a ‘sculpture’, it is not the interactive, either. I would like focus on not an ‘interactive’ aspect of Fujihata’s work but a ‘plane‘ one because he often refer the planeness about his works.

Fujihata discover an unique field in the computer where there is no difference between the plane and solid. Forbidden Fruites are made by the Stereolithography which makes a solid from pilling many planes up. Fujihata used this technique in order to directly take out a shape of data form the computer. In Forbidden Fruites, the planes become the solid. I will compare the plane in Forbidden Fruits with Leo Steinberg’s the flatbed picture plane in order to make clear the meaning of the plane in the data.

Beyond Pages is the most famous in Fujihata’s work because it is the interactive one. Although Fujihata points out that Beyond Pages propose new semiotic issues, I consider that this work also give a question; What is the plane in Graphical User Interface age. GUI shows a new two-dimensional surface due to that it is not two-dimensional but looks two-dimensional. Beyond Pages projects the image of pages onto the table, then we regard it as the book. However we can not grab the book on the table because it too thin to catch it. There is overlapping very thin image plane on the desktop. Beyond Pages show us that every planes in GUI is too thin to grasp with our hand.

Unformed Symbols overlaps the image trumps with the real trumps. Fujihata does not use the computer in this work, therefore this is not interactive one. However, this overlapping makes new thin world on the table top, then we experience more complex interaction in the physical law than the computer does. Jyunya Ishigami makes a big thin table. This table’s thinness is very strange which is very similar with Unformed Symbols. These works do not use the computer. However, more complex interaction happens in two works because of their own thin plane. The plane is not only the plane, but also the solid. We already meet this situation on the computer, but Fujihata’s Unformed Symbols and Ishigami’s Table make no gravity field in the real gravitational world. In this thin world, there is no difference between the plane and the solid.

I would like to call Fujihata an architect of the plane. Of course, Fujihata is an artist but I dare to say he is the architect in the superflat age. Fujihata anticipates the architects in the superflat movement. The superflat is the idea of Takashi Murakami in order to export the Japanese art into the world wide art market. Although the superflat comes from the Japanese subculture, this idea is also related with the computer’s flat world like GUI. We start to refer to computer engineers as IT architects, therefore I call Masaki Fujihata who knows the essence of the computer as the architect of the plane.