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ARTWORK       INTERVIEW       ARTIST       

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Floating through an archipelago of fragmented spaces, architectural forms unfold into multiple worlds, interweaving religious references in an atmosphere reminiscent of the sacred. With no visible human figures, the viewer moves alone through corridors and across suspended paths, as if navigating a deserted, mythical world.

The Travels of Mariko Horo (2006) was originally presented as an interactive 3D narrative installation. Users were invited to explore the virtual environment through the eyes of the fictional character, Mariko Horo, traveling through space and time in search of the “Isles of the Blest,” the Buddhist paradise said to float in the Western Seas. The project draws on historical periods when Japan was largely isolated from the West, and on the ways limited knowledge produced imagined, often fantastical visions of foreign cultures. By positioning the viewer inside Mariko’s perspective, the work can be seen as a meditation on the exoticizing gaze; it reverses the traditional Western viewpoint and reveals how fantasies of the “foreign” often reflect the viewer’s own cultural assumptions, projected onto the place imagined.

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INTERVIEW

Can you walk us through your creative process for your work?

When a theme grabs my attention I do an immense amount of online reading, plus surfing for related photos and other images. As my work is almost always time based or deals with traces of the passage of time, I then look at how those individual images or states of being could evolve within the work in a way that holds the viewer’s attention. This can be a quietly dramatic compositional evolution, or a metamorphosis that links together different positive and negative aspects of the theme, to speak to and touch the viewer’s emotions.

How do you approach the balance between the technical aspects of digital creation and the conceptual or narrative elements in your work?

I tend towards relatively simple forms and surfaces, so that I can focus mainly on the conceptual or narrative elements without wasting much time on the technical aspects needed to create the work. I try to stay on the low end of high tech, partly also so that I can reach a much larger audience than I could if I used the latest, greatest and usually most expensive technology available.

If you could choose one technological invention from the past or future, what would it be and why?

If I could choose one technological invention from the future it would be the much longed for augmented reality contact lenses, which would enable us to superimpose whatever content we create over our physical reality. But I refuse to wait until that far off time: I emphasize that when viewing AR with smartphones we are not “looking at AR images in a tiny display” – we are actually using the display of the smartphone as an “ARscope”, a viewer that enables us to see other dimensions that surround us but are invisible to the naked eye, just like a telescope enables you to see things that are really there, but too far away to be visible to the naked eye.

ARTIST INFORMATION

Tamiko Thiel  is a digital artist whose practice spans virtual reality, augmented reality, video installation, and interactive 3D environments. Her work explores the intersections of space, place, and cultural identity.

Trained in both engineering and fine art, she was lead product designer on the Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2, among the first commercial AI supercomputers, before pioneering artistic uses of VR and AR from the 1990s onwards. Her work has been exhibited internationally at major institutions including MoMA New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and ICA London, and she has received numerous honours, among them the SAT Montreal iX Visionary Pioneer Award (2018), a major retrospective at Kunstverein Wolfsburg (2022), and the SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award for Digital Art (2024).

Thiel was born in 1957 in Oakland, USA and now lives and works in Munich, Germany.