Blending
Realities

Keiichi Matsuda’s dystopian short film, Hyper-Reality, follows one Juliana Restrepo into increasing disillusionment, overwhelmed by constant bombardment from the augmented reality that has plastered itself over her physical environment like a glittering, transparent skin of sensory overload. Merger, the latest of several self-­initiated films by Matsuda, likewise depicts an oppressive near-future reality in which the main character, an accountant, installs gesture-controlled augmented reality interfaces to optimise her working environment and ensure she can be reached by her clients at all times. Matsuda’s artistic films have been shown at venues including MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Shanghai Expo and the V&A in London.

 

A British-Japanese citizen now living in London, Matsuda describes himself as a critical designer. He has long been fascinated by how our living environment will change as advancing digital technologies increasingly intermesh and interweave our physical and virtual realities. The interaction designer and architect is partnering with leading technology companies and startups in his recently founded design studio, Liquid City, to explore how these ideas can be realised using technology. An important priority is to work with his customers on developing a positive future for these augmented realities and for the metaverse. Asked how he aims to achieve that, he replies, I approach the issue in two ways. I extrapolate the dark side of techno­logy, then try to find out how we can use it to build a better future.

From a very early stage, you were involved with the possibilities ­offered by technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). It seems to me that as an architect and UX (user experience) designer, you combine ­architecture and the digitalisation of space. In your films, you extend physical space into virtual space. What interests you most about this?

 

K

M

I am interested in how new technologies become a part of everyday life. When I started thinking about AR in 2009, consumer technology was driving these huge cultural shifts in the world around us. Smartphones and ­social media were just taking off and radical models of production, like open source, were entering the mainstream. It felt like technology was changing the way we lived.

 

As a designer of spaces, it was very exciting for me to discover the technology of AR, because it allowed me to think about space not as something which is made just with concrete, but something that could be made out of bits and bytes as well. Our experience of space can be a hybrid of virtual and physical. It raises many new design questions and opportunities that have not been considered before. It also brings many of the problematic issues of online culture into the physical world. There is no guarantee of a positive outcome, but our choices can make a huge difference to how things turn out. That’s a really exciting place to work as a designer.

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What are the boundaries between physical and virtual environments? Or will we switch back and forth between them fluidly in the future?

 

K

M

With VR you are fully immersed in another world, cut off from your physical environment. But AR introduces the idea of blending realities together, because it layers the virtual content on top of the physical world. So this blending of realities is the core essence of AR.

 

And actually, for me, focusing on the difference between physical and virtual is not so interesting, because we already live our lives in these kind of hybrid environments. It’s perfectly natural for us to daydream or get lost in a book–both virtual experiences. We interact with toothbrushes and cars and books, as well as with email and Zoom. The brain doesn’t seem to care much which things are physical and which are virtual.

 

Of course there are many limitations to virtual objects. The experience of eating a virtual apple can’t compare to eating a physical one. But virtual objects can have properties that are impossible in the physical world, so it works both ways. I’m not really trying to think of how we can replace the physical, or anything like that. It’s more about how we can expand our reality beyond the physical, and what that allows us to do.

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You see yourself as a critical designer. What form does your criti­cism take in your films?

 

K

M

I was always drawn to the glossy concept videos of what our future could look like, made by the big tech companies. But of course, those videos have no motivation to be critical or to consider any of the unintended consequences of their technologies. They serve really as a way of promoting and advertising that technology, and encouraging people to buy into it.

 

In those films, high-net-worth people walk through airports with their futuristic devices and work across different time zones on very important projects. Every­thing works flawlessly. That didn’t reflect my experience of techno­logy—or of life, for that matter—at all.

 

When I started making films, I tried to subvert the format of the techno-utopian vision video, and to introduce some more critical edge. My work concentrates on the mundane experience of life that normal people have, where technology can cause new problems as it tries to solve the old ones. I try to write characters who reflect the reality that I see around me. They are trapped in a sinking gig economy, or trying to keep up with an increasingly automated workforce, or feel kind of alienated, patronised or dehumanised by technology. I try to embrace the messiness and imperfection, and explore both the positive and negative impact of technology.

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In your 2016 concept film, Hyper-Reality, you present a provocative future in which physical and virtual realities are merged. Is this primarily a dystopian vision?

 

K

M

I try to look at things from both sides and leave the viewer to decide, but of course there are many parts of Hyper-Reality that are quite horrific. To me, it’s not the information overload that is scary but the systems and patterns at work in the background. I think the basic narrative, the thrust of Hyper-Reality, is really about the main character being immersed in this structure and belief system that she didn’t really choose. Her world is optimised around the interests of corporations, and she has become a passive consumer. At the end, when she finds religion she is finally able to ­escape. It’s supposed to be a redemptive reckoning.

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