Akihiko Taniguchi

Akihiko Taniguchi interrogates the conceptual border between virtual and real worlds. He employs Google Sketchup as a tool to repetitively represent, replicate, and express complicated daily lives. His works come in multiple forms including installation, performance, and video. He also produces technological apparatuses and software for the works. Big Browser 3D, created with software of the artist’s own invention, provides a virtual world where the audience can act as a protagonist. Viewers can control the VR characters by having them move or jump. They can also use a web browser or search engines. The browser window is as large as the character’s size; this leads us to reconsider the browser of the post-internet era and the changed mode of the windows through which we look at the internet. 

Something Similar to Me/About Seeing Things allows us to experience an avatar and a virtual space that Akihiko Taniguchi created by himself. The avatar image is of the artist himself, produced through a 3D scanning process. While controlling the avatars that “resemble the artist,” the audience can see a virtual landscape or read texts. The texts mostly describe “seeing things,” which let the viewers reflect the meanings of seeing—looking in a mirror, reading books, seeing clouds, or looking at a computer monitor, and so on. The texts of the work explain that the 3D data obtained through 3D scanning are the collection of multiple views from different angles, and that we can “see” them only due to the many layers from the past overlapped with those of our own. Through this interactive essay in a virtual world, we can reflect on who “I” am and what “seeing” means.