Liquid Walls: The Digital Art of Tamiko Thiel

You find yourself in a room, with rice-paper walls and bamboo mats, a Japanese house standing on stilts in middle of the sea. Wooden stairs lead down to the surface of the water, and on the water floats a boat. You descend the staircase and you are in the boat and you sail into the sea in this boat drawn by seahorses, as golden icons float upwards overhead like self-similar fractals, products of some iterated function system, or air bubbles from some invisible leviathan. You are Mariko Horo, Mariko the Wanderer, or you are seeing the world through her eyes, and the time is some point, or many points, between the twelfth and twenty-second centuries. You sail westward to a land that alternately appears as Paradise, Purgatory, Limbo, and Inferno; you reverse Marco Polo’s travels, discovering and dreaming Venice as an exotic Occident. Ghosts of Palladio and Dante haunt these islands, as do darker specters of a more recent past, of Vietnam and Abu Ghraib, of the Virgin Mary as Guan Yin, of Byzantine frescos and Tibetan tankas swirling in a fiery Court of Final Judgment.¹

Like her creation Mariko Horo, the digital artist Tamiko Thiel is a border-crosser and an explorer of virtual space. She recalls:

growing up mixed race in the U.S.A. at a time when the media did not admit of non-white Americans. Although born in the U.S., my first memories are from Japan (where I lived from ages two–five . . .), and my first impressions of the U.S. were of a strange, empty land filled with tall, pale people. As a child, growing up outside the Japanese American community in a white, working-class neighborhood in Seattle, since I could not “see” myself in the images of America, I maintained that I was Japanese—until I turned fourteen, that Age of Enlightenment, and realized that I was not socially Japanese, would not fit into Japanese society and would not want to do so.²

The daughter of a Japanese-American mother and a German-American father, Thiel moved to Berlin in the 1980s, and now works largely out of Munich, while at the same time moving around the world, principally exhibiting in Germany, the U.S., and Japan. She exhibited The Travels of Mariko Horo in an initial version at the Media Arts Festival in San Jose in 2006 and in a final version in Munich that same year. The work has gone through several variations, including one in which it was coupled with a live Butoh dance performance, for which the dancers Shinichi Iova-Koga and Ishide Takuya used the installation as real-time virtual space before which, and within which, to perform.

Thiel’s creations take place in immersive virtual space, typically as part of a museum or gallery installation. The software runs on a Windows gaming PC and a projector displays the image on a large screen before which stands a podium with a joystick. The spectator takes the joystick and, much as in a video game, journeys through the virtual world. Borders and border-crossings, central to the medium of VR generally, are especially so in Thiel’s work. Two installations, one exhibited before Mariko Horo and one after, are particularly noteworthy as they form a virtual diptych of the politics of walls. The first installation is entitled Beyond Manzanar (2000) and the second Virtuelle Mauer/Reconstructing the Wall (2008).

Thiel created Beyond Manzanar in collaboration with the Iranian-American writer Zara Houshmand. The installation, now part of the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art, virtually re-embodies the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps such as Manzanar. Built near an oasis in the high desert of Eastern California, Manzanar was one of ten camps to which over a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans were forcibly relocated and imprisoned as a national security measure during World War II. Beyond Manzanar reflects on that site, and draws parallels between it and threats made against Iranian-Americans after the hostage crisis of 1979–80. Begun by Thiel...