Fantasy Captured in Plastic Models: A Desk Diorama

This work takes the theme of a “fantasy captured in plastic models”, utilizing and rebuilding computers and their peripheral devices with plastic models to make a diorama, creating a world about which all of us have surely once daydreamed. With a personal computer – a “building” for preserving an individual’s memory – here becoming a fortified base for protecting those memories, and a mouse that can move around freely as a defensive “tank”, IKEUCHI’s work embodies ideas acquired from intrinsic forms and how things are used, bringing their special qualities and possibilities into sharp relief. The remodeled computers and PC accessories have been rebuilt as structures that stage a whole worldview, their electronic circuitry, wiring and mechanisms remaining intact so the equipment can still continue to be used.

Every year the Entertainment Division receives many entries featuring figures and dioramas, but this work outclassed them all both qualitatively and quantitatively. And yet, it is not simply an incredibly elaborate, huge diorama based on plastic models. IKEUCHI’s diorama features everyday gadgetry like desktop computers and USB sticks, but everything can still work and be used. The mixing of two scales – the miniature and the actual – along with the useful and the useless stirs all manner of delusions, though this is merely one part of the meaning of the work. When it is “form ever following function” and “function-form compatibility”, design today gets boring. IKEUCHI is affirming that functionality and concept are not important; the real duty of a designer is to make form. All theorizing aside, though, simply look through the binoculars and it is exceptional. (KUBOTA Akihiro)