Augmented Mask
Courtesy of The Container, Tokyo
July to September 2017
Tobias Klein’s “Augmented Mask,” an installation that incorporates an elaborate 3D printed mask, colorful projection mapping, a virtual reality headset and references a popular Chinese opera, looks a lot like future art as imagined in science fiction.
Appearing at the small The Container venue in Meguro, which has the same dimensions of a shipping container, the piece is designed so that it can only be fully experienced by one person at a time. That experience, afforded by the VR headset, places the user into a continually morphing 360-degree landscape in which a bodiless insectoid-looking head, also continually changing in shape, hangs in the air and moves in sync with the viewer’s own head movements.