datum [ sunset ]

The first work in a series that emerged through an artist residency conducted from 2015 to 2016 at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), The University of Tokyo. Based on images taken in Moerenuma Park in Sapporo, known as the final work of Isamu Noguchi, the piece was exhibited in the park’s snow storage facility. If one regards the six pieces of information held by each pixel of a video dataset—space (x, y), time (t), and color (RGB)—as spatial coordinates, then all the pixels of that video can be represented as a point cloud in six-dimensional space. By rotating them within this six-dimensional space, previously unseen images hidden within the original video data emerge, without disrupting the relationships (distances) between the original pixels. This is also an inhuman worldview that arises by treating the different concepts of space, color, and time symmetrically within the same space. The work was inspired by how researchers of superstring theory, which deals with spaces of ten or more dimensions, can readily reconfigure their theories by altering the number of spatial dimensions.