Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Simply Un-Natural

Edible game of B-I-N-G-O.

Valentine's Day is one of those awkward non-holidays when you are forced to go to work on a day you should be doing something else. My girlfriend Kris (who also happens to be my wife) recently invented a festive variant of the game Bingo that involves those hard, sour Sweetheart candies one gives around this season. It makes it awfully hard to play the finish the game as you tend to ... errr ... lose pieces during the game.

Today I had a discussion in my office at MIT about my new movie Linear Way with a local film director. After seeing the piece, he asked me, "What's simple about that? It looks awfully complex." I realized he was right in a sense, but wrong in the other. My new movie tries to create a simple structural enclosure for many naturally complex elements. Yet that concept wasn't at all simple to convey.

Then he said in regards to something else, "... you know, it's simple like nature is." And then a bell went off! Nature is as complex as you get, but we perceive it as something simple and natural. My "simple structural enclosure" was essentially an attempt to depict the natural world of the computer. In other words, in Linear Way I try to picture the synthetic nature of the digital realm. I'm working on new pieces for an upcoming show at Fondation Cartier in Paris on this very theme. I wonder where it will lead?

Posted by maeda at February 14, 2005 05:16 PM