Heaven Can't Wait

'You're trying to catch a cloud', we say in Japanese to someone who expresses a dreamy, child-like wish. Yet even today, when air travel is common, voluptuous layers of cloud seen from the tiny, chilled window of a jet seduce you and beckon you to grasp them, despite the fact that you know they are only clusters of vapour. When you fasten your seat belt and dive jerkily earthwards, the gap between the haze of greyish mist and ice, and the tactile, sensual desire felt only minutes ago, can be puzzling. What you think you know doesn't always correspond to a reality that can only be experienced by actually being present.

Kazuhiko Hachiya allows the audience to experience such surprises. His most recent work, Air Board ß (1999), is a two-metre long, one-person hovercraft, inspired by the hoverboard in Back to the Future 2 (1989). The residual envy I felt when Michael J. Fox became airborne on-screen evaporated the moment I saw the artist step onto the board and float into the air. Air Board ß stifles the disinterested voice in a jaded corner of your mind which nags you that the movie is only a fictitious portrayal of the future. It engages your sense of wonderment by staging a seemingly improbable future that unfolds in front of your eyes making a leap from the virtual world of feels-like-floating to the concrete world of really-floating.

This tangibility doesn't simply stem from the fact that Air Board ß actually takes off. The work includes a jet engine which is ignited in front of the audience this is an artwork capable of generating extreme noise and heat. Atop a 25 square-metre stage made of inflammable material, the little machine blasts you with jet engine roar, enveloping your entire body the inaudible ultrasound waves feel sticky against your skin. Within ten-seconds the temperature in the 500 square-metre room rockets. At this moment, I realised that Air Board ß, Hachiya's homage to the jet engine the invention of the 20th century was created to allow you to experience this overwhelming sensation of noise and heat.

Such an attitude towards wishing the impossible also forms the core of Hachiya's email application PostPet (1996-present). The drab corporate feel of email software is replaced by a tiny creature who personally delivers your email messages and lives in a virtual home on your desktop. Knowing that your pet is only binary data does not diminish the surprise and delight you feel when they open the door and return after delivering an email to a friend. You can use the mouse to pat them or beat up their rivals, and be miffed when they drop by at someone else's house without your consent (why her house?). The raw emotions felt towards them are real. Hachiya well knows how important it is for an artwork to be inviting every work contains such tangible, somehow child-like, elements of contact 'nothing begins until it is touched, nothing is delivered until it is experienced'. Why should this maxim, taken for granted in the field of entertainment, be so neglected in art? It's simply an example of the common courtesy shown when two strangers greet each other and look their companion in the eye.

From the outset Hachiya has always paid special attention to this aspect of art, producing work that entices the audience into actually becoming involved. Inter DisCommunication Machine (1993-95), for example, is comprised of two parts to be worn by an audience of two: a head-mounted display with video camera and a backpack-style transmitter with a pair of wings containing antenna. (Have you ever imagined what it's like to have wings? Ever wanted to become an angel?) The experimenters, exchanging data through their wings and attempting to communicate via each other's borrowed perceptions (their own vision is seized by the machine and swapped with their partner's), are inevitably surprised at discovering themselves as seen through their companion's eyes. This strange self-discovery, very different to that of Narcissus, can be both restricting (in that it can only be accomplished in collaboration with another person) and revealing. Observers witnessing this awkward, primitive form of communication, inevitably share the sense of release felt by the participants on finally orientating themselves and finding each other.

These angels which appear to be asexual creatures (although Hachiya claims you can have sex while wearing his machines), but many of his other works have apparent gender distinctions. As with the 'Air Board' series, Light/Depth (1993-95) is ostensibly designed with boys in mind. When viewing this work, which resembles a miniature skateboard ramp, I am made very aware of being female. There is little in it that I can physically relate to I am not a boy or a skate-boarder. My body hasn't experienced the velocity or the anti-gravity state of hurtling down a half-pipe; only in my mind, and with help from the wave images displayed on the monitors at my feet which transform according to the boarders' movements, can I imagine what it's like. Recalling my childhood envy towards boys effortlessly jumping off trees, Hachiya's work confirms that a work of art is capable of evoking such a nostalgic (and very familiar) feeling of being left out. But he does not forsake anyone his work seduces a non-skate-boarder with its Minimalist beauty, and identifying this duality is conceptually gratifying.

At the other end of this gender-pendulum are works geared towards girls, including the swing-like Over the Rainbow (1995) and PostPet. Over the Rainbow measures five metres in height (it was originally intended to be 20 metres-high) and reminds you that the childhood challenge of who could swing the highest was fun because it was risky. Only when the seven riders are at completely different heights does a rainbow appear a metaphor for the impossibility of perfect co-operation, as well as a symbol of fantasy. The important thing is that our desire to dream of achieving the unattainable, 'to catch a cloud', is not denied. The boys versus girls contrast between works such as Air Board ß and Over the Rainbow is a refined polarity. Both have been created to provide an anti-gravity experience, but in Japan at least women who can successfully manipulate the former and men who are unable to restrain themselves from squealing kawaii (how cute!) upon encountering Momo-chan, the pink teddy bear of PostPet, would be considered a rarity. We are forgivingly but forcefully reminded how much we are conditioned by social structures. While communication is one of Hachiya's main preoccupations, his work has the ambiguity and multiple meanings that only art is allowed to possess. His employment of intimacy and user-friendliness the 'soft touch' on the outside cleverly masks the violence and intimidation of the system residing deep within. Under the plush, gentle and accommodating appearances of Hachiya's work is a hint of violence.

Yet, this intimate and inviting quality is essential. What generally comes to mind from the term 'interactive art' is the image of a strange space called the 'artwork' in which inapplicable, one-dimensional theories are disguised as being cutting edge. There is always a moment when you come to your senses and wonder what you are doing there. You have legs why sit in the middle of a coarse-textured, rushing townscape? You can read why sit in a darkened room staring at an unending stream of blinking, deliberately obscure text? And if you can't even touch the robot stumbling awkwardly in front of you, wouldn't you rather be playing with a dog? Why hang out with a person who keeps bragging about how much smarter they are than you?

But then, tired of such futile experiences, how can I, along with millions of others, spend hours enjoying consumer video games the national pastime of Japan? The reason is simple: unlike supposedly 'interactive' art, the most important element of a superior game is the interface between the player and the created world. The interface is skillfully programmed to allow opportunities for the player to experience feelings of accomplishment, if not ecstasy, in overcoming their limitations. Players have described this sensation as like 'going to heaven'. When you achieve something after a struggle, when someone does you a favour, when you see, hear, taste, or touch an intoxicating scene or object these unpredictable moments become incomparable personal realities. Such moments, however, are not scarce in Seeing is Believing (1997), you can sample everyday, random words, left behind by strangers who gather on the internet. Wearing special glasses and peeping into a hole in a small box (subtitled Sheep ­ remember The Little Prince?), the words are spelt out in infra-red light, visible only to you, and you are reminded that these moments are as numerous as there are people. The wonder you experience vaguely points to one truth we are all alone, but not lonely. Life, lost in the accumulation of uneventful realities, buried and forgotten in daily chores, is cleansed through a filter called art and reclaims its own brilliance. If artists are those with highly receptive antennae, I ask they also improve the quality of their transmitters. Then we can really catch a cloud, or ascend to heaven, in our own direction, to our own desired height, to a place even artists don't yet know.