The Travels of Mariko Horo

Machinima walkthrough of one path through the interactive VR large projection installation. NOTE: additional 2006 demo video is low res, please excuse my pixels!

Sometime between the 12th and the 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, Japanese for "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 a "reverse Marco Polo fantasy" in which Mariko Horo constructs the exotic and unknowable Occident. Users will never actually see Mariko - in essence they will be Mariko, seeing the exotic and mysterious Occident through her eyes and her experiences. Coming from an island nation, she has constructed her Horo-Gramms according to a map of Venice - the earliest real, existing map from the time of Marco Polo - and interprets the islands of the Venice lagoon as a map of all the West. The Travels of Mariko Horo draws on images from Venetian and Byzantine art history and collides Dante's Christian universe with Buddhist cosmology, creating multiple heavens and hells, and taking the user through a cycle of deaths and rebirths.

The piece was inspired by Japanese artists of the "Nanban" ("Southern Barbarian") genre that existed between the 17th-19th centuries while the country was closed to the outside world. Drawing on only a few images and maps enhanced by their own fertile imaginations, they created fantasies of an exotic, unknowable West. This interactive, self-driven VR installation, shown as an immersive wall-sized projection with a simple joystick that young and old can use as a navigational device, is a journey through cultural perceptions of heaven and hell, a work of Nanban Art for the 21st century.