My First Me, Know Yourself Like Never Before

During the Milano Design Week at Issey Miyake flagship store the exhibition developed by Mashaiko Sato, professor of new media and cinema at the Tokyo University.One of the most interesting events of the Milano Design Week was held on April 17th at Issey Miyake flagship store in via Bagutta. The exhibition “My First Me, Know Yourself Like Never Before” was developed in four installations by Mashaiko Sato, professor of new media and cinema at the Tokyo University. The exhibition “My First Me” is part of a larger project by Issey Miyake “A Piece of Cloth”, exploration through different disciplines of new possibilities in creativity.The exhibition is an interaction of ideas taken from his latest book “New Ways of Understanding” interactive installations that make use of technology and lead to feelings never experienced before, to a sense of creativity beyond nationality and race. The first installation is “Pool of Fingerprints” feeling of affection to our fingerprints in the motion to know each other and recognize among many other similar identities, where the user introduces through the digital reader his fingerprint that like a little fish swims among the others present in the virtual pool and then return from the rightful owner to his recall.The second is “I am looking at me being watched by someone else”, the first representation of seeing oneself through the eyes and the mind of a stranger. The visitor looks through binoculars and is surprised to see that what he sees is himself observed by someone else.Real awareness of how many eyes are spying on us in everyday life, in all public places. It reminds us of the assumption by Vito Acconci, a great architect, designer and avant-garde artist “Once the square was a place for meeting and exchanging ideas, now it is an opportunity to be spied on.” The third installation is titled “Ride a swing with a finger”. By placing two fingers on the swing model connected to a screen, the undulating motion of the vehicle is displayed, proving a sensation never perceived before. The fourth and last installation concerns a set of collaborations and research experiments by Mashaiko Sato.

Alessandro Turci speaking

Mashaiko Sato photo by Takuji Okada