Sports Time Machine

Sports Time Machine is a device that lets you race against past running records that are projected onto the wall, and was premiered as part of the tenth anniversary celebrations for the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. Runners can at tempt to break their own records, as well as race against family members, friends and animals, with race records simultaneously saved as 3D data. It focuses on the act of running as not only a memory but also how it can remain as media, offering physical communication through sports, traversing past, present and future. The venue was set up in a shopping street in cooperation with many Yamaguchi citizens and artists. Dur ing the event period, the “Great Media Sports Fest” festival and workshops were held, while citizens organized a conference and the online features continue to expand. Looking ahead to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, it will develop as a project that connects with the future.

Sports Time Machine was installed in a shopping street in Yamaguchi City in summer 2013, where people got together and ran for all they were worth. In our daily lives, the idea of “running” is restricted and so we tend to forget its elemental pleasures. A kind of substitute is how we run when playing action games, and now the sensation of pressing down the “b-button” to sprint has become imprinted into our bodies. Sports Time Machine resolved this discrepancy by making video game characters l i fesize. Player data was projected as a “shadow” onto a wall. One is reminded of TAKAMATSU Jiro’s 196:60s painting, and by association the shadows imprinted by the atombombs. The atom bomb and the computer game are two sides of the history of science technology. The players are running through this field of overlapping contexts. Sweating, laughing – their carefreeness is beautiful. (IIDA Kazutoshi)