Keiichi Matsuda

Keiichi Matsuda

About

Keiichi Matsuda is a British and Japanese designer, filmmaker, and architect who has worked between London and Tokyo. He graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL, where the first of his concept films was made as part of his master's thesis.

His method is research-by-design. The output is a film rather than a paper, and the argument is carried by what the viewer is made to see and hear at once. His work has entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Work

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop (2010)

The first in a series of design-fiction concept films, developed as part of his Bartlett master's thesis. The stated interest is the potential for augmented reality to recontextualize the functions of consumerism and architecture and change how people operate within them.

The film follows the making of a cup of tea in a kitchen where every surface carries interface. Matsuda combined hand drawing, physical models, collage, and live footage. The point it makes is that routine domestic maintenance becomes more labor intensive once it is overloaded with superfluous information.

His framing premise is that the architecture of the contemporary city is no longer only the physical space of buildings and landscape, but increasingly the synthetic spaces created by the digital information people collect, consume, and organize.

Augmented City 3D (2010)

Shot in stereoscopic 3D, following two people on their way to meeting each other and showing how each adapts their perception of the world around them. The film concerns the deprogramming of architecture and the spontaneous creation of customized, aggregated spaces, with the protagonist able to switch an urban background from graffiti to gardens instantly.

Matsuda's project statement makes a specific argument about what augmented reality is. He describes it not as an escape from meatspace or an uploading of the soul, but as the dissolution of the divide between physical and virtual, which requires re-evaluating the city as a human-computer interface.

Hyper-Reality (2016)

Approximately six minutes, and the work that made his reputation outside architecture. Set in Medellín, Colombia, it follows a woman through a supermarket errand in a city saturated in media, where physical and virtual have merged.

Matsuda used real brands, including Starbucks and the Cootrasana bus service, on the argument that their presence strengthens the film's postmodern appeal and constitutes an ironic nod to the systems the film critiques. He described the film as a platform for debate for anyone worried about where technology might be heading.

One sequence shows supermarket aisles lined with black and white fiducial markers, the visual targets machine vision systems use to locate themselves, unreadable to humans and placed solely for the benefit of the machines. When the protagonist's interface fails, the world becomes unusable, because the physical environment has been designed for the computer's view of it rather than hers. She is then attacked by a disguised figure who resets her system and erases her data, an ending that reads either as theft or as release.

Research Interests

• Augmented reality
• Dystopian, utopian, and notopian futures
• Architecture Fiction

Relevance

Matsuda's films are the standard visual reference for what a maximally augmented environment looks like, and they are frequently cited in argument as a thing to avoid. What they document precisely is the failure mode of interfaces that push everything into the center of attention at once, with no ranking and no periphery.

The fiducial marker sequence in Hyper-Reality makes a related point that gets less attention. When an environment is built to be legible to machines, human legibility becomes a separate problem that has to be solved on top, and a person without a working interface is left in a space that no longer addresses them.

Further Reading

• Architecture Fiction
• Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environment
• Architectural Intelligence
• Simulacra and Simulation
• Society of the Spectacle
• Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising
• Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series
• Neuromancer
• Snow Crash
• Place: The Networking of Public Space
• Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture: City, Technology and Society
• Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
• Low Resolution Indicators

External Links

• km.cx, personal site
• Hyper-Reality
• Hyper-Reality, V&A collection record