LOST # 12

Ryota Kuwakubo is a Japanese artist who predominantly works with electronic and multimedia installations. His exhibit at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, LOST # 12 (2014), is a kinetic sculpture that creates a remarkable phantom landscape out of the play of light and shadow. It consists of a small-point light source fitted to the front of a moving toy train that runs slowly over rails laid on the gallery floor. Arranged around the rails are small objects, a majority of them everyday commodities picked from markets in Kochi. When illuminated at close range by the moving train, they produce a mesmerising procession of shadows that rise and fall, rescaling the relationship of these objects to the viewer’s body.

According to Kuwakubo, the objects are arranged in such a way that the shadows they throw remind a viewer of familiar images —a forest perhaps, or a tunnel or a cityscape— that each viewer might perceive differently, drawing from his or her own personal experiences. The installation thus creates a self-reflective space, summoning a viewer’s conscious and subconscious recollections.

As the artist explains, built into LOST # 12 are two possible perspectives from which to visually experience it. Some in the audience might grasp the whole installation as a simple mechanism made up of some daily commodities and a moving point light. Others might choose to see only the projected moving shadows. It can evoke both an immersive virtual environment and a succession of vistas seen from a train, thus connecting two seemingly opposite visual experiences– one of the digital realm and the other pure analog.