This work of multimedia art, Digital Forest, is the result of a joint effort by Yoo Gwan-Ho and Takashi Kokubo, each of whom has successfully made unique artistic achievements in different genres. In this work, the artists try to express the digital environment symbolically by expanding sensory perception. What Yoo and Takashi focused on is how they can reduce the world of non-materials (including the world of virtual reality created by computer) to the world of matters. For this, they tried to expand the spectrum of the visual world by using computer that can capture the subtle changes of colors that human eyes are not able to perceive.
Yoo used “Paint Box”, a computer graphic program developed by a British company Quintel, for scanning, coloring as well as imprinting images made of dramatic brush strokes and delicate shades on stainless steel boards arranged in zigzag along the walls of an exhibition hall with the screens illuminated by special lighting. In another room, more stainless steel boards of geometrical shapes are installed both at the center and by the walls in such a way that the colors of Paint Box create a fantastic atmosphere helped by moving lights of all colors shed from walls.
Yoo’s visual work is then amalgamated with the digital ‘environmental sounds’, sounds recorded from nature by Takashi Kokubo. Takashi’s sounds can also be explained in the same context of the installed figurative work：
The ‘single sound space of multi-layers’ can be compared with the “painting that plays music” in which a complex virtual sound space is created by variations that are played around a thematic sound. The space thus created makes viewers feel as if they are in the middle of, say, Grand Canyon. The ‘multi sound space of multi-layers’ is created as a space of virtual reality that is interactive with the space of painting created by sounds.
