Tobias Klein's "Augmented Mask," an installation that incorporates an elaborate 3-D printed mask, colorful projection mapping, a virtual reality headset and references a popular Chinese opera, looks a lot like future art as imagined in science fiction.
Appearing at the small The Container venue in Meguro, which has the same dimensions of a shipping container, the piece is designed so that it can only be fully experienced by one person at a time. That experience, afforded by the VR headset, places the user into a continually morphing 360-degree landscape in which a bodiless insectoid-looking head, also continually changing in shape, hangs in the air and moves in sync with the viewer's own head movements.
There are direct visual similarities to the giant floating head in the dystopian sci-fi film "Zardoz," and the color-inverted landscapes in the final scenes of "2001: A Space Odyssey." However, at a more general and conceptual level, "Augmented Mask" resembles instances when filmmakers have tried to imagine art for fictional audiences who are accustomed to technology, forms and abstractions as yet beyond our understanding. A recent example of this would be the opera scene in the Star Wars prequel "Revenge of the Sith."