The Travels of Mariko Horo

Tamiko Thiel
Source: Tamiko Thiel

Tamiko Thiel

The Travels of Mariko Horo , ongoing
Co-workers & Funding
Tamiko Thiel, music by Ping Jin. 2006
Documents
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Description
The interactive 3D virtual reality installation "The Travels of Mariko Horo" is a reverse Marco Polo fantasy imagining the fictitious Mariko Horo as a Japanese time-traveler searching for the Western Paradise of Buddhist mythology, the Isles of the Blest floating in the Western Seas. Mistaking Venice for the entire Western World, she builds an exotic, fantastic Occident visually inspired by Byzantine icons and Dante’s cosmology, but structured according to Buddhist concepts.

Users experience the Western World through Mariko’s eyes, exploring a lonely, abandoned archipelago at the farthest ends of the earth. The virtual world however is a non-cartesian space in which vast universes can be hidden in small, drab buildings: a pavilion transports user s to a piazza filled with jeweled palaces; a small temple can open into heavens filled with angelic hosts or hells of shrieking fire. Trapped in an eternal cycle of death and rebirth, users see that their actions have consequences, letting loose evil into the world or transforming it into a paradise.
Keywords
  • aesthetics
    • navigable
  • genres
    • installations
      • interactive installations
      • virtual reality (VR)
  • subjects
    • Arts and Visual Culture
      • panopticons
    • Body and Psychology
      • imagination
    • History and Memory
      • history
    • Nature and Environment
      • globes
    • Religion and Mythology
      • myths
      • religions
    • Society and Culture
      • digital identity
      • folklore
      • utopias
  • technology
    • displays
      • electronic displays
        • projection screens
    • software
      • Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML)
Technology & Material
Display
5m wide x 3m high front projection screen
Hardware
Windows XP or 7 PC, custom modified joystick and stand, stereo loudspeakers
Software
Bitmanagement Software 3D VRML browser
Bibliography