I don’t know if anyone has had the chance to catch the third episode of the 7th season of Black Mirror (“Hotel Reverie”) where the digital world merges with the real world in a remake of a movie, but that is sort of what the theme was to “Machine Love: Video Game, AI and Contemporary Art”, the current exhibition at the Mori Art Museum we visited this morning. A refreshing morning walk took us to the Rippongi Art Triangle where, inside a sky-scraper, the museum was on the 53rd floor. Like an idiot, I had purchased our tickets online. This meant I had to log on to the website with a password and information about where I lived, etc., and choose a time of entry. I went with 11 AM figuring we would probably be early, but what the heck. At the Louvres we were early and had no problem getting in. We were 45 minutes early when we got to the Mori. But we weren’t in Paris anymore. The man taking tickets shook his head. We had to come back at eleven. Meanwhile, people buying their tickets at the museum were easily granted admission.
When we returned after having coffee and a scone, the exhibit proved to be worth the wait. There were interactive exhibits that were engaging as well as big screen animation gone berserk.
But once all the digital prestidigitation was done, my favorite viewing was a film by Gabriel Abrante called “Ornithes”. Based on Aristophanes’ “The Birds”, the movie followed a group of actors in Haiti who dressed up in large bird costumes and performed in public squares. Made in the aftermath of the earthquakes that devastated Haiti in 2010, the purpose of their act was political, but in the film it is undercut by the commentary of a cab driver who talks about how young people dressed up as animals won’t change a thing. The last shot has an actor slumped over in his bird duds riding a donkey through a desolate countryside as two young women talk about how cute he looks.
Not in the Machine Love exhibit, but part of Mori’s collection, were large photographs done by Katayama Mari, who, at the age of nine, had the lower part of legs amputated due to tibial hemimelia. Taken by herself, they show her on a daybed surrounded by objects she’s made, hand-sewn dolls and hand-painted prosthetics. Like the prosthetics, she sees herself as a medical work of art.
