The Travels of Mariko Horo

Virtual Reality Installation at 911 Media Arts Center Fall 2007

Sometime between the 12th and 22nd centuries a woman journeys westward from Japan, traveling through space and time, searching for the “Isles of the Blest,” the Buddhist paradise said to float in the Western Seas. She will be called Mariko Horo, Mariko the Wanderer.

She encapsulates her impressions of the places she sees in her travels in a series of “Horo-gramms,” 3D virtual worlds. She invites you to visit her worlds and see the West through her eyes.

The travels of Mariko Horo is an interactive 3D virtual reality installation, a fantasy virtual environment that users explore at their pleasure and peril. Mariko is a fictitious character I have invented to incorporate the viewpoint for this project. Users never actually see Mariko – except perhaps in a mirror. In essence they will be Mariko, seeing the exotic and mysterious Occident through her eyes and her experiences.

For Japan, of course, the entire world lies to the West. For hundreds of years before there was contact with Europe, Japan incorporated artistic and religious influences “from the West” – from the Eurasian continent. For Japanese artists trying to imagine Japan, the power of fantasy could often take them only as far as a vague and undefined “Asia” – for both Far East and Far West the epitome of “foreign” and “exotic.” Thus some Japanese artists depicted Holland with the same buildings as they depicted China, and Western artists as late as Gilbert and Sullivan depicted the Japanese “Mikado” in the style of a Chinese Emperor. This geographic confusion finds echoes in Mariko’s Last Judgement scenes, inspired equally by Byzantine Christian frescos and Tibetan tankas.

In 2003 I spent 3 months at the Kyoto Art Center as a Japan Foundation Fellow, researching this period in Japanese history, gathering images and talking with Japanese art historians. In The Travels of Mariko Horo I use the viewpoint elucidated in this research to create my own fantasies of the Mysterious and Unknown Occident. In addition to my research I also draw on my personal experiences: as a 5 year old child I returned from Japan to my native USA, a large, strange and empty land that I could no longer remember, populated with large, light-haired people.

As Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities used Marco Polo as the point of departure for a meditation on the meaning of cities, I use the figure of Mariko Horo as a point of departure for a meditation on the Mythic West. Her journey is of course an inversion of the “Marco Polo Syndrome.” The 13th century Venetian traveler has long represented the exoticizing gaze that looks from Europe into the depths of Asia, a symbol of Western Man exploring, categorizing and analyzing the exotic cultures of the East. The exoticizing gaze thinks itself to be a magnifying glass, but in actuality it is a view through a half-silvered mirror: the viewer means to describe new lands, new peoples, new cultures, but in reality he sees images of his own culture superimposed over a vague and exotic background. I wish to reverse this gaze, invert the mirror and view the exotic West through Mariko’s fictitious but observant eyes.