BeHere / 1942
A New Lens on the Japanese
American Incarceration

BeHere / 1942 began with an investigation of the many pictures depicting events of 1942 held by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Library of Congress (LoC). The individual photographs held in these archives are not arranged or presented as we might view them in a photography collection, or a magazine. Rather, I set these photographs to memory, reordering them any number of times in my mind. It was as if the people where there right in front of me; I was even able to witness the passage of time.

From this experience, I was able to pick out a few representative individuals. I also took oral histories and testaments from that moment into consideration, eventually developing a short scene that could be performed by actors. These actors entered a specialized studio, surrounded in 360 degrees by anywhere from 32 to 48 high-resolution cameras. They then acted out the scene to be captured on video as 3D models. The film shoot left us with images taken by these many high-resolution cameras, but the 3D models were created through “Volumetric Capture” computer software. This software creates a 3D model from each individual image taken by the cameras. Connecting a series of these images produces a 3D film where models appear as if moving sculptures.

Volumetric capture technology has been utilized in music videos or movie scenes, but this exhibition marks the first time anywhere in the world the technology has been used for large-scale spatial data and the creation of a next generation movie.

AR—literally a technology that augments our own reality—overlays information invisible to the naked eye upon the real world we see around us. This has been called the ultimate computer-human interface for accessing all varieties of information and has been used in many experimental ways. Generally, people have tried to turn AR into some kind of video game. However, the concept we are attempting here—utilizing AR technology in a conscientious way by overlaying the historical past upon real space—is likely to inspire a variety of future projects.