"Gnothi Seauton" (know thyself), the Ancient Greek aphorism must have come up to the mind of all those visitors with some grammar school or philosophical knowledge who dropped by the Issey Miyake shop in Via Bagutta during Milan Design Week (on until yesterday) to see Masahiko Sato's installation "My First Me: Know Yourself Like Never Nefore".
Design week closed yesterday, but the ideas, inspirations and memories of products and installations seen during it always stay with the visitors in the weeks that follow the event, and prompt them to delve deeper into specific themes and issues. Sato's "My First Me" is definitely among them.
A professor at the Graduate School of Film and New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts, Masahiko Sato is known for researches going from film and animation to neurosciences and video game software development ("Kurushi / Intelligent Qube" for PlayStation).
At the Issey Miyake shop he introduced ideas from his latest book New Ways of Understanding that seem to have some connections with the Ancient Greek maxim encouraging people to know themselves to get a better grasp of human nature.
Sato asked visitors what they knew about themselves apart from basic info of the kind we (irresponsibly) share on social media – so our name, face, height and weight, our tastes when it comes to music, food or style and the names of the people close to us.
The researcher argued that technology has changed our lives when it comes to knowing ourselves: audio and video recording devices gave for example us the chance to discover how we sound or look from the external point of view, but we still do not seem to know ourselves well enough.
He therefore devised a series of interactive installations to prompt visitors to experience new sensations to discover their identities. The first one was the cutest: it consisted indeed in a pool of fingerprints that encouraged visitors to think about the diversity and uniqueness of fingerprints, while experiencing feelings of attachment or affection. Visitors got their fingerprint scanned and the image then became a sort of little fish that went out swimming in a pond of virtual light with other visitors' fingerprints. Yet, if that visitor came back to the pool, the fingerprint would go back towards its "master" like a dog would, sparking in this way affection and tenderness in the visitor.
Surveillance cameras and monitors inspired instead the next installation - spooky binoculars that gave the viewers the impression of looking at themselves through the eyes and brain of a stranger.
In another space surrounded by Issey Miyake's latest collections, a miniature swing allowed visitors to let their fingers enjoy a ride while looking on an iPad screen to a park-like setting. In this way visitors lived a childhood experience from another perspective and dimension and realise that the senses may at times provide us with distorted experiences.
The event also included a selection of video works: among them there was also "Ballet Rotoscope", a film in whcih a dancer's body is mapped by dots and lines, and "A-POC inside", a study about the Gestalt laws of grouping that interpreted from a fashion perspective the principles claiming that humans naturally perceive objects as organized patterns.
For his next project Masahiko Sato hopes to develop tools to improve knowledge of the self tailored for children: chances are he will do so, becoming a sort of futuristic Bruno Munari-like figure from Japan.
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