[four walls]

Looking back, a year after this piece was completed, it seems to me that the work is not really, as I said at the time, about space, but actually about myself. Or it's about a different kind of space – the space of the self and it references the original live work that I made in the period 1993–98. In one of those strange circular forms that become evident after making artwork for a long time, this piece recalls those performances of the early 90s, solo, on a journey, open-minded, intense. In those early works the subject was clearly autobiographical, but in this piece the content is more oblique – talking about the self as a different kind of material, the 'me' that we always project outside onto the world. So from London to Paris, Taipei to Tokyo, the story remains always inside and however far the narrative moves forward into different geographical spaces, it never really leaves myself. Because the bubble of the self is everywhere. The piece also looks towards atmosphere as the ultimate goal and sees life as a series of dusks or sunrises – in all senses, both physical and metaphysical. In fact the original title for the piece was 'dusk' and this quality of atmosphere, of emergence, of merging that is evident at twilight is certainly still present in the work, especially in Pt 4 of [four walls] where I visit the Confucius Temple in Taipei. I've often thought that atmosphere is a quality that is very undervalued in our culture. It's the thing that allows us to stay in a room, a park or a building for a long time, without actually focusing on any one thing and this feeling of atmosphere, of being here, of staying is something that I've tried to develop in my work, particularly in the large-scale 3-D installations .sciis and iamme – where very little visual material is shown on screen. Q. what would make you stay? It sounds simple but it's the most difficult question of all, especially in virtual spaces where the tendency is to overwhelm the user with sensation in order to encourage them to remain online. In the piece it's this simple need for atmosphere that finally leads me to Ryogoku-Bashi Bridge in Tokyo, meditating on the little blue houses by the riverside. Rather than the spectacular man-made beach in the harbour or the high-rise apartment blocks, this is the experience of Tokyo that will stay with me – cycling alone down by the river, seeing a motorbike submerged at the water's edge, looking out over the vast reed plains, birds flying low. These are the things that made me want to stay. So perhaps this feeling of atmosphere is not predicated on buildings, time, or even space itself. Maybe it's finally to do with ourselves because all architecture melts in the face of the self and no forms are real, but simply abstractions, conduits, patterns, narratives. The self that begins this piece by walking down a road in Camden Town discovers, through a series of encounters, that the world is in fact indivisible, shifting, transitory, vulnerable. And this self that we believe 'sees' is also not here at all. It's this world of impermanent forms that [four walls] accurately describes. 'I bring my own world into existence, live it out, and take it with me when I die' – Kōshō Uchiyama: 'Opening the Hand of Thought' Michael Atavar [four walls] Web Notes 2004