Augmented/Words in the City is an augmented reality (AR) work that transforms tweets made to the city into three dimensions and positions them within that city. This installation work was first undertaken in Shibuya in April 2020, and then in Yūrakuchō in October of the same year. I walk through the city, gathering the words that rise to the surface of my mind. I then use AR to place 3D renderings of those words in the places they came to me. The twisted objects are not easily legible, and cease to function informationally. There is no doubt that they come from words, however, and they float there, laden with meaning. The objects are connected to location data and can be viewed by holding up a smartphone at specific positions. These are virtual objects; they do not exist in reality. They are visible to those who can see them, and invisible to those who can’t. Their existence there may be virtual, but they certainly do exist. Drifting in the city like living things, the three-dimensional words have substance.

3D drawings are superimposed onto the city (Shibuya). 3D objects derived from writing take on urban textures. They are drawings for the city, but also a kind of mark engraved into their locations. Transforming drawings into 3D objects gives the lines a body, and they continue to exist in their location, in their space. The act of layering drawings onto the city is both a kind of graffiti and a ritual that inscribes life into a location. In the East, the origins of writing are not so much in communication generally, but rather in transmitting messages to the gods and to beings invisible in nature—as the traces of such messages. I see the act of writing as imbued with a kind of life, as a prayer-like act. And cities are not merely artificial constructs—they are a contemporary form of nature. Establishing these drawings with the textures of the city could be described as a dialogue with the nature of today, and the work itself as the traces of that dialogue.

There is thought to be an interplay between the senses of sight and touch. The world we see with our eyes is a reconstruction in the brain based on reflected light—that is to say, it is a manufactured visualization—and other senses, including touch, can also play a role in this process. If we accept that the scenery we see is a visualization reconstructed in the brain, then what is the true form of this object I am touching now—of this world? What’s more, people are permanently connected to smartphones, which could now be considered to be an extension of the body or a new organ. The smartphone is another eye through which we see the world. This work involved taking photographs with a smartphone camera, creating a 3D scan of the location where they were taken, and overlapping the 2D photographs with the 3D data. The process of blending/reconstructing both the 2D and 3D itself overlaps with the phenomenon taking place in our bodies. The machine’s eyes (photographs) and the machine’s sense of touch (3D scans); your own eyes, your own sense of touch as you process the work. Perhaps, through their mixture and reconstruction, cities may reveal some small part of their nature.

The locus of human consciousness is the subject of continual research, but the truth of the matter remains unclear. Even so, I believe that the ego is derived from words, and that it is within words that the ego resides. Without words, you would have neither thought nor concern. Viewed in this way, the true essence of a person is in their words; it seems like one could even go so far as to say that it’s less a case of people using words, and more that people are controlled by words, governed by words. The words are the people. The Word is Human is a series of figures, the heads of which are words that have been made into objects. There are many works that transform words and writing into 3D objects but, by directly putting words in the place of human heads, this work focuses directly on words and people. Anonymous figures stand still in the city, dressed in contemporary attire and resembling both men and women; these figures with words for heads are symbols of the fact that everyone’s essence is to be found in words.