[-empyre-] intro from tamiko thiel

[Tamiko Thiel <tamiko@alum.mit.edu>]

Hi Y'all -

here's a brief statement of my artistic interests in using VR, and an 
abstract of the Beyond Manzanar virtual reality installation which is 
being shown in the Lab3D exhibit at Cornerhouse. The full piece is not 
available online for various technical and legal reasons, but there are 
screenshots and some small VRML excerpts (which give you an idea of the 
stage set, but not the play.)

Yours, Tamiko Thiel


Artistic Statement:

I am interested in social and cultural uses of virtual reality, and in 
developing VR as a powerful (hyper)narrative medium. With VR we have the 
capability to visualize metaphors in a 21st century form of Surrealism 
that expands the dreamscape from an image into an environment. We can 
build extraordinarily rich, sensitive environments wherein the structure 
of the virtual space itself and of the user's interations with that 
space create an intimate dramatic tension between the user and the 
virtual environment.


Beyond Manzanar abstract:

 http://mission.base.com/manzanar/

Beyond Manzanar is an interactive 3D virtual reality environment, a 
metaphorical landscape that explores media scapegoating of ethnic 
populations in times of crisis and invokes the human spirit that creates 
beauty under adverse conditions.

The work is a collaboration between Tamiko Thiel, a Japanese American 
media artist, and Zara Houshmand, an Iranian American poet and theater 
director. The mechanisms of scapegoating are universal and can occur in 
any country, but to focus the universal into the personal the authors 
have created a visual dialog based on the experiences of their own two 
ethnic groups. The historic experiences of Japanese Americans in World 
War II and the more contemporary experiences of Iranian Americans form 
the basis for a surreal and poetic work contrasting immigrant attempts 
to achieve the American Dream with mass media demonization of entire 
groups as the “face of the enemy.”

The genius loci of Manzanar Internment Camp in Eastern California is 
used to focus the stories of these two diverse groups into a single 
dialog. Manzanar was the first of over 10 internment camps erected to 
incarcerate Japanese Americans families during World War II under a 
false charge of military necessity. In the 1980s the American courts 
declared this internment to have been “not justified,” but the principle 
of mass internment of an entire ethnic group on the grounds of military 
necessity still stands. During the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 –1980 
and with every subsequent fear of middle-eastern terrorism there are 
verbal, physical and legal attacks on Iranian Americans and calls to 
intern them “like we interned the Japanese.”

Ironically, Manzanar’s high desert oasis strongly resembles the austere 
landscapes of Iran. Even the grid-like traces of the army camp evoke the 
geometric order of Iranian gardens, representations of the cosmic order 
of paradise. Irony indeed, because the Japanese American internees did 
in fact build gardens within Manzanar”s barbed wire fence – depictions 
of the sacred islands and ponds of the Buddhist Western Paradise.

Beyond Manzanar uses the unique spacial characteristics of navigable 3D 
virtual reality to kinesthetically locate you inside the Manzanar 
Internment Camp. As you explore the camp your kinesthetic sense is 
engaged to underscore the emotional impact of confinement. Your eyes see 
the passes that lead out of the valley, but you stand at the fence and 
can go no further. Confined within the camp, you have nowhere to go but 
inwards, into the refuge of memory and fantasy. At the heart of the 
piece lies a vision of the garden as an ancient form of virtual reality, 
an image of paradise created as a refuge from the outside world.

An edition of Beyond Manzanar is in the permanent collection of the San 
Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, USA.


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 Tamiko Thiel       Media Artist

 tamiko@alum.mit.edu
 http://mission.base.com/tamiko/

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