Masaki Fujihata

Masaki Fujihata is one of the pioneers of new media art, renowned in Japan as well as abroad. His career began in the 1980s exploring computer graphics as a medium for art. In the mid-1990s Fujihata produced canonical pieces of what would later be called “interactive art” – Beyond Pages (1995-1997) and the exploration of digital network Global Interior Project (1995). Beginning in 1992, his experiments with GPS technology take an unusual technical approach in gathering data, making for a meticulously composed and unprecedented series of cyber-spatial creations that may best be described as “the cinema of the future” or “the shape of media to come”. His has realized works include Field-work@Alsace (2003), Simultaneous Echoes (2009) and Voices of Aliveness (2013).

Fujihata’s AR public art project BeHere (2018) recreated scenes of old Hong Kong and can be viewed with an AR app. The project continued with exploration using volumetric captures and was exhibited as BeHere / 1942 (2022) at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

Alongside his practice as an artist, Fujihata has continued to work as professor at Keio university and Tokyo University of the Arts for morethan 20 years, and is Regent professor at UCLA, Los Angeles in 2020.