Masaki Fujihata
«Field-Work@Alsace»

In his interactive Installation Field-Work@Alsace Masaki Fujihata deals, as in some of his earlier works, with the representation of time and spatial dimensions in the moving image. With digital videoimages and GPS data the artist provides a typographic and temporal system of coordinates of the Alsace, which he translates into a virtual 3D space. The video images are shown along the three-dimensionally represented GPS traces. Fujihataís Field-Work@Alsace enables the viewer to follow the images and their traces and to thereby experience the complexity of the interconnectedness of space and time.

(Source: Future Cinema, exhibiton, ZKM Karlsruhe 2003, http://www.zkm.de/futurecinema/fujihata_werk_e.html)

«Just maybe the special circumstances of a Japanese named Fujihata showing up with a camera to conduct interviews might verve to create the right circumstances for both Germans and French to ‹open up.› [...] My methodology this time for ‹Field-Work@Alsace› was to record digital video images together with GPS positional data and directional data (which ay the camera was pointing) from a special electronic compass. Place and time and visuals and camera orientation, all recorded together in one go. [...] Cumulative positional data registers as white lines in space representing GPS data connected over time. These lines occasionally form random knots or seem to move unnecessarily, showing up the technical thresholds of th GPS. [...] The people just as they are here are simply beyond me, just as I must certainly fall off their map. The boundary drawn here may well be between myself and them.»
Masaki Fujihata

(Source: Future Cinema. The cinematic Imaginary after Film, exhib. cat., Shaw, Jeffrey and Weibel, Peter (eds.), The MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), London, 2003, p. 416f.)