Ephemera
Aila Takenaka
See it On Campus: Level 1
Visitor InfoECU Award Recipient
The President’s Media Awards for Excellence – Best in Installation – Winner
Medium: patched washi paper, mixed media video and sound
Duration: 9:36
“Ephemera” is an interactive piece, that the viewers can enjoy seeing from multiple angles and feel the immersion of the paper wall and its delicate movement.
Artist Statement:
The media installation piece “Ephemera” hopes to offer viewers a short but overflowing amount of happiness and warmth. The landscape of these happinesses is meant to be seen from the perspective of a person who is experiencing depression.
The installation consists of a wall-size patchwork of Japanese paper, Washi, used as a semi-transparent screen, colorful mixed media videos, and composed serene music. The thin papers are very sensitive, and they swing when audiences touch them gently or walk around the installation. This collection of papers becomes a huge screen that reflects the detail of the projected images, which seems like someone’s mental wall or shell to cover their anxiety.
The project comes out of a personal experience of isolation and comparing oneself with others. Wild flowers and cats are the only things that give temporal ease because they are not humans. Shutting off noise and vision is more comfortable because looking up to see the reality of society is not easy. Happiness ironically leaks out of one’s depressed vision.
Conveying that the future is either permanently delightful or devastating is not the main goal of this project, but showing how depressed people can face a society with joy at an uncertain moment is one of the practical purposes this work seeks to explore.
