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Fumito Ueda Concussion Watch by Dream Cast 12/13/2016, 8:48am PST
Simon Parkin wrote:

SP: At what tine did you decide to apply for a job in the games industry?

FU: After I graduated, I bought the Amiga and got hooked on it. I was still trying to find a way to express my art using this machine. Shortly after, I saw that Sony was holding an art competition. I entered with an art installation piece. Somehow I got through the first round. Then the second round and into the finals. I ended up receiving a judge’s stipend for it. I realized, however, I couldn’t live off this. So I collected the film projects I’d worked on and sent them off to the video game studio Warp. That was the first place I submitted the work to, and they offered me a job.

SP: Wait. You need to go back. What was this winning instillation?

FU: The first round was that I had to submit a written concept to Sony. The second stage awarded me the allowance to make the instillation. It was around $1,000 or so. After that, I’d go off and create this thing. It got displayed at Minato-Mirai 21 in Yokohama. It’s a gigantic complex. There was a huge tent there that would display these installations and people would come and vote on their favourite. The finalist was awarded the prize at Sony’s headquarters in Ginza.

In terms of the project itself: imagine a worn down small cage for a pet rabbit or parrot. It was intentionally aged and worn. At the bottom, there was a layer of soil. Beneath the soil was a series of small motors. They were hidden. The surface structure of the dirt maybe looked like a mole hill. It was patchy and churned up. The sides and the ceiling of the cage had scratch marks, like an animal had tried to escape.

The motors hidden in the dirt were controlled by a radio controller. The idea was that there was a cat that lived under the earth in the cage. There was a sign to that effect. So people would walk up to the cage and peer in to look for this animal. I’d secretly control the motors, and it would spit out dirt onto people’s faces or noses.

I wanted to make something that would have more of a lasting impact than a painting. I wanted people to go home and find soil on their shirt or in their hair. That would be memorable art, I thought.

SP: Wow.

FU: There’s one more part to this story… I mentioned the final judges’ award presentation took place on the rooftop in Ginza. It was filled with executives from Sony. The competition was called the ‘Art and Artists Exhibition’ but it was less about the artwork than the artists. They wanted to find a new, emerging voice in the art world. The final event was that you had to showcase your talent in front of this panel of judges on the rooftop of the Sony building in the Ginza. This took the form of performances: dances or whatever. The previous year someone responded to questions by playing a guitar. As you can imagine, there were lots of whacky ideas as everyone tried to impress these judges by showing off how creative they were…

My colleague and I who had worked on the art piece together were not good talkers. We don’t do well in front of crowds. So we were discussing how we could make a great impact. Something people would really remember. We settled on the idea of a street fight. We wore costumes and then I decorated my headgear to look like a wild animal.

When it came to our turn to perform, we just went for each other. There was no holding back. So much so that my friend knocked me out. It left a huge pain around my face, neck and shoulders. If I remember correctly that took place in 1994. Twenty-two years later, I still have a pain in my neck from that fight. It still creeps up sometimes, on a cold day.
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