Sachiko Hayashi
Last Meal Requested
Abstract:
Last Meal Requested investigates our human history through three incidents of the last 15 years – the Halabja massacre of 1988, the beating-up of Rodney King in 1991, and the public execution of a woman in Taliban-Afghanistan in 1999. The images from these three incidents are put under the light of historical context, thus juxtaposing our present with our past. At the same time the voices taken from various documentaries intermingle with them, offering personal perspectives on those social conditions. By so doing, Last Meal Requested plays with two poles on two different levels – the past/ the present, the society/ the individual.
Biography:
Sachiko Hayashi is a visual artist who primarily works in video and screen-based interactive media. Hayashi holds a BA in International & Cultural Studies with an award winning undergraduate thesis from Tsuda College, Tokyo, a MA with Merit in Digital Media from Coventry School of Art & Design, Coventry University, UK, and completed additional postgraduate studies in Computer Arts at the Royal Univeristy College of Fine Arts in Stockholm.
Hayashi’s works exhibit an unique blend of aesthetic and conceptual foundation with the use of technology, as she consistently explores co-relation between image, sound, conceptualisation in art, and discourses in philosophy and other social disciplines.
She is best known for her net art that involves examination of human nature with high use of interactivity, in which not only the retrieved intricate picture of its subject becomes its focus but also our own reaction toward what is being revealed through interactivity. These works together with her CD-ROM work (“The Norns”) have been recognised by the general visual art communities in addition to new media circles. Their exhibition venues include Janco Dada Museum, Israel, Nordic Contemporary Art Biennial, Gothenburg, Norrköpings Konstmuseum, as well as many international new media art festivals such as Viper, Basel, ciber@rt, Bilbao, FILE, Sao Paulo, Thailand New Media Art Festival, Bangkok, etc. One of her net art work “Last Meal Requested” has been published by Rhizome, NY, as part of GROK, 2007, their first educational CD-ROM for the youth.
Her video works, an investigation of temporal composition in subjective imagery, often in combination with audio-visual experimentation, have won wide recognition internationally over the years. In 1991 she founded MASH, an art duo, with EAM composer Magnus Alexanderson, to investigate various audio-moving image combinations. MASH’s video works have been shown at such prestigious festivals as Transmediale, Berlin, Not Still Art, New York, and European Media Art