Ten years ago, when a new cultural facility opened in the western Japan city of Yamaguchi, its founders sought to fulfill a role quite different from those museums in the countryside.
Unlike many public museums in rural Japan that function as touring venues for exhibitions that have already shown in the major cities, or which feature long-established artists familiar to a local audience, the city-funded Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) was designed to be a place where artists from various genres could be invited to create and showcase new and original artwork. And not just any artwork, but pieces that are loosely associated with a fast-changing, definition-defying form of creativity that often utilizes media technologies such as computer graphics, animation and the Internet, and is known as "media art."
At the grand opening of the facility, located on the site of a former school some 50 minutes by bus from Ube Airport — which is a 90-minute flight from Tokyo — the center's staff collaborated with award-winning Mexican-Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer to create a huge installation artwork using 20 powerful searchlights able to illuminate places as far as 15 km away.