The Travels of Mariko Horo

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The interactive 3D virtual reality installation "The Travels of Mariko Horo" is a reverse Marco Polo fantasy imagining the fictitious Mariko Horo as a Japanese time-traveler searching for the Western Paradise of Buddhist mythology, the Isles of the Blest floating in the Western Seas. Mistaking Venice for the entire Western World, she builds an exotic, fantastic Occident visually inspired by Byzantine icons and Dante’s cosmology, but structured according to Buddhist concepts.

Users experience the Western World through Mariko’s eyes, exploring a lonely, abandoned archipelago at the farthest ends of the earth. The virtual world however is a non-cartesian space in which vast universes can be hidden in small, drab buildings: a pavilion transports user s to a piazza filled with jeweled palaces; a small temple can open into heavens filled with angelic hosts or hells of shrieking fire. Trapped in an eternal cycle of death and rebirth, users see that their actions have consequences, letting loose evil into the world or transforming it into a paradise.