REPLICATING A REPLICA

Hidetoshi Tominaga

20 May 2020

The emerging technology of Game Engines enables us to produce realistic scenes, however, it relies on a typical framework of two different worlds; the virtual world it creates and the physical world it imitates. The name of Unreal Engine, one of the major Game Engines, also suggests this typical framework. Is there a way to reconfigure the framework?

Polar Bear, 1976, Hiroshi Sugimoto.

One of the early works relating to this topic is a series of photos of dioramas taken by Hiroshi Sugimoto. This series captured a wired situation in which a replica looks “realer-than-real”, according to him, when it is overlaid with another technique of replication.

During my exchange terms at AA School of Architecture, I started working on a “Digital Replica of an Italian Restaurant in Japan”^[1]  with Ana Nicolaescu and Sebastian Tiew.  I am interested in Unreal Engine not as a tool for making a realistic image, but as a medium that can illustrate multilayered reproduction of the physical world. To demonstrate this, I took a well-known Japanese Italian restaurant chain “Saizeriya” that itself is a replica, or rather an amalgam of Italian and Japanese. The restaurant design comprises of replicas of Renaissance paintings, which create an illusion of depth and a sense of being removed from the actual setting. The interior is made up of superficial finishings (such as fake stucco on the wall, or wood texture on the table,) the techniques that I found quite similar to the texture mapping in 3D software. The food and drinks give away that the restaurant is ultimately Japanese by offering Japanese soft drinks such as melon soda or Doria; a Japanese version of gratin with a rice base. Therefore, this project is a digital replica of a replica.  Consequently, the digital replica becomes a  part of the continuous process of reproduction. The whole multilayered reproduction has been eventually perceived as ordinary and has become indistinguishable from the every-day.

Images from “Digital Replica of an Italian Restaurant in Japan”, 2020, Hidetoshi Tominaga

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