Mamoru Iriguchi’s moving planes of flat projection are a visual signature, a recurring technique constructed through a wacky series of contraptions that disguise their sophistication. In 4D Cinema the footage projected onto them are used to question time itself, the ability of a subject to define their own home and the biographic responsibilities of the performer and audience. The nature of memory is as much its subject as Marlene Dietrich, both in what the audience remember of themselves as they were fifty minutes younger, and in thoughts of how your memory will survive after death.
It is apt that this questioning of memory happens through a screen. There is constant media speculation on the consequences of modern humanity’s deferral of the responsibility of remembering onto external devices. No longer do our brains contain sets of memorised phone numbers or addresses, they're filed away as discrete pieces of digital information accessed through a screen or a cloud. Iriguchi’s work highlights the risk that this trust of the screen might come to dominate our own memories. Believable biographical material is delivered through screen and authoritative speech, causing a brief cognitive dissonance with my vaguely recalled pop cultural history. Was what was said about Dietrich true, whether played forwards or back? Can I trust my disbelief without a surreptitious Google?
As the performance finishes, the last thing the audience see is themselves reversed in moving image, a playback of themselves entering unaware into the space. It’s a riff on self-perception and its communication, on the marketing of ourselves as a central concern, the modus operandi of social media and advertising, subcultures, clothing and rep. Like the mirror stage of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the point at which a toddler locates themselves in the image in the mirror, video documentation shows the subject to itself as something others see. In 4D Cinema our image is reflected back to a later version of ourselves, through an unaware entrance, and the ramblings of a reticent historical subject.
- LC
Mamoru Iriguchi - http://www.iriguchi.co.uk/About.html
How the Internet Inhibits Short-Term Memory -http://www.medicaldaily.com/information-overload-how-internet-inhibits-short-term-memory-257580
Digital Amnesia: Real or Not? -http://www.techtimes.com/articles/65431/20150709/digital-amnesia-spreading-due-to-internet-and-smartphone-use-or-crass-marketing-ploy.htm
Metaperceptions: How Do You See Yourself? -https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200505/metaperceptions-how-do-you-see-yourself
The Mirror Stage –http://www.lacanonline.com/index/2010/09/what-does-lacan-say-about-the-mirror-stage-part-i/
Mamoru Iriguchi/Lewis Church Interview (Exeunt) - http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/between-the-genres/