SPACE FOR YOUR FUTURE

Everyone is talking about how we live in an age when the road ahead is unclear, when it is impossible to imagine what the future will look like. At the same time, however, it is when the future is unpredictable that changes in expression occur in their liveliest form. This is because, paradoxically, it is at such times that possibilities open up in all directions. Space for your future reflects the circumstances that exist now, when there is no longer "a future" that everyone can share, something advocated back in the 1970s and earlier, and when the only option available is for each individual to imagine their own future. Rather than the future being something attainable that will surely arrive, talking about the future is on the verge of becoming an entirely conceptual exercise.
Today, when not only is the future uncertain, but also discovering oneself amidst broad narratives and communities is difficult, the only thing we can really depend upon is our own place, or in other words our own bodies and the space around them. In recent years, it has been said that people are becoming more and more individualistic and less and less social, although as media expert Ian Kerkhof has pointed out, as a result of the sharing of information, "a kind of collectivity" has emerged to take the place of this social side, and this collectivity is giving rise to a hitherto nonexistent, new stage of consciousness that is collective but at the same time private. Kerkhof has concluded that "the influence of television can be blamed for the fact that spatially related things make up a large proportion of our imagination." (Note 1) This is because we all share via television similar news images of happenings occurring in various places around the world. On the other hand, our own places are recognized as conscious space. This conscious space in the form of our own places is the sense of space created by the merging of virtual space and bodily, physical space.
Society's orientation towards information technologies and the nonphysical has prompted a shift away from design that appeals to the sense of sight to design that appeals to the consciousness and the five senses, while at the same time the advent of networking has transformed design from an awareness of existence in the form of the individual to something that appeals to a sense of awareness in the context of our relationship with society, nature, and the information environment. For example, affordance theory in design has brought a new perspective to the relationship between our bodies and minds on the one hand and forms on the other, while the conceptual framework of 'space' has proved effective in verifying how subjects change as a result of relationships with various things. In the field of art, the space installations and techniques based on interactivity and the intervention in space in various different contexts that have developed over the last 20 years are a reflection of the same circumstances.
Space denotes far more than the simple opposites of inside (the self) and outside; it is something between us that takes many different forms. Architectural, physical space; the space around one including one's own body and one's children; bodily space in the form of inner space; virtual space; metaphorical, conceptual space. Proposals relating to these and other kinds of space are what make up the theme of this exhibition.

”Space for your future”　Yuko Hasegawa (Excerpt from the catalog text)