four walls [four walls]

Online e-say commissioned by DRUH (the sixth in my e-say series). Travels in London, Taipei, Tokyo and Paris. Virtual reality, Confucius, Tadao Ando, balloons, temporary shelters. Plus the cultural impact of the Sony Walkman. [four walls] was a six-month creative research programme at the DRUH (Digital Research Unit Huddersfield), with outputs online and a performance lecture. I also did a performance lecture on 17/10/03 at DRUH Huddersfield. The contents of this performance (throwing the I Ching, visualisations, stepping in and out of the space) previews the materials shown in dusk (2006) four years later. '[four walls] architecture and virtual reality 2002/3 where a wall is a window and the sky a tree where a house is a car and a barking dog a door' (From Michael Atavar [four walls] Postcard) 'Michael Atavar's early work took the form of live performance but in recent years he has created a body of considered, poetic and painterly works for the www. Employing a minimalist aesthetic he invites us to explore a landscape of colour, populated with ideas, thoughts and reflections on the nature of space, being, place and memory. Recently Michael has begun to create 'virtual worlds' in VRML and Shockwave 3-D, extending and evolving his personal language. His work, .sciis [sensitive cumulative intelligent immersive systems], which can be downloaded from his website, has been installed in a number of locations as a large-scale interactive projection. The DRU Research Programme will allow Michael to re-visit the performative elements in his practice, and continue to evolve his e-says.' (From DRUH's Online Notes) '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 Web Notes) I introduced [four walls] at DRUH with a one-off performance lecture. The talk was formative for me and offered a blueprint that I used extensively in dusk (2006). I threw the I-Ching and talked about atmosphere, presence. If all my work can be seen as one work, this opportunity to present at DRUH, as a return to performance (I didn't realise this at the time), provided a bridge to dusk (2006), Black Magic (2009) and later presentation formats. 'This is the Japanese symbol for mouth or opening (when used alone it is pronounced 'kuchi' but in some cases the pronunciation is changed to 'guchi' for euphony) – I only found this out after I'd decided on the title of the piece but it seems quite appropriate. I just like looking at it. A funny thing happened with one user I sent the address to – I asked him later what he thought of the piece. He said it was lovely; just that square on the screen. When I asked him about the rest, he didn't know there was any rest. He didn't think to click, he thought that was it. So maybe this is it.' (From Michael Atavar Lecture Notes) ATTC-Minus 5: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble Commissioned: Tom Holley, DRUH – Digital Research Unit, The Media Centre, Huddersfield Website: Text, programming and audio files by Michael Atavar. Digital animations by Mia Huang Special thanks: Martin Marshall, Mia Huang for their generosity in Taipei and to Ida Ryogokudo Zazen Dojo in Ichikawa City, Tokyo for their hospitality in Japan Graphic reconstructions: Richard Scarborough