Artist from Tokyo, Japan

It goes without saying that the borderless virtual world of the internet has become a huge part of people’s lives all over the world. On social networking sites, we build our personalities out of a mixture of reality and fiction, and our daily lives as well are supported by the daily necessities that we purchase on the internet; this has become a fact of our everyday lives. In this way we can see that the real and the virtual are no longer necessarily opposing worlds, but rather complements that fuse together to create one world.  The boundary between the two melts together so seamlessly that it sometimes causes us confusion, making it difficult to capture what true reality is.  By placing visualized digital error in the physical world, Yuka Numata generates a disruption in a world where dichotomies such as real and virtual, analog and digital, global and local are seamlessly interwoven. In doing so, Numata does not affirm one or other, but instead showcases, paradoxically, the complex intertwined nature of the existing world as it is. 

Numata’s "JPEG Drawing" series forces spectators to become aware of an alternative to reality by intentionally bringing the disconnect between real and virtual into our daily lives. In this series, she physically materializes computer-made digital computer drawings via plastic fusible beads, a material many of us remember fondly from our childhood, and analog manual labor. By incorporating the materials, techniques, and subjects that existed in that era, the artist explores new possibilities within the ancient and historied act of “drawing”; at the same time, by incorporating the discrepancy that arises when materializing the digital into the physical, she is able to create an intense feeling of discomfort in our daily lives.  This feeling of uneasiness makes us conscious of the fact that the real and the virtual are seamlessly connected, and forces us to critically reconsider our perceptions.

In this way, Numata and Sakashita create discrepancies within reality that provide viewers with the opportunity to take a step back from their usual short-sightedness and reevaluate reality from different perspectives.  In presenting their individual perspectives through their daily lives regarding the contemporary world we live in and the problems we face, we are able to see the practice of micro-poetics in action.