The intense sensation of the dancer's fingers on my shoulder, on my knee. It was the moment when my body came back to me. For the first time, I realized that I had lost my body in a cognition that relied almost entirely on sight and sound.

If there is such a thing as a genre of comprehensive art, it will not be something that is constantly maintained and expressed, but rather something that emerges only when unprecedented artistic ideas are fused with highly concentrated outstanding technology. It has an unpredictable and explosive element, and is largely the result of daring experimentation at a time of transformation, rather than the result of a mature culture. (Richard Wagner in techno-turgy is no different.)
In this sense, "border 2021" is a rare example of the truly comprehensive art of our time, and a remarkable work. In my opinion, "border 2021" is the first work of perceptual experience that allows us to have a sensory realization that the real, VR, and AR are all part of a parallel world. There is no superiority or origin anywhere, and the real is actually just one page of a mirror world (or should I call it a sliding world?). In the revised version, something even more non-linear has been created, and I look forward to more developments in the future.

The physical world and the information world merge together to such an extent that the title they should change the tile to "borderless", and the sound and acoustics implying the interaction of the physical/information reinforce the reality of the world expanding before us.
When you surrender yourself to the automatically-controlled mobility wheelchair and your body becomes a part of the system, you are suddenly touched by the dancer, and you recognize the border between yourself and others, and the vibration from the floor that the performer makes connects you and the object without touching it. In other words, we are made aware that the sense of touch defines the border of one's self and transforms the sense of the body.
This work questions the border between the physical and the informational, the self and the other, with a multi-sensory stimulus that could be even excessive.

A dramatically delightful poetic experience: you put on the VR headset, wander into the programmed space of art, and instantly the sound of evala stimulates your hearing. As you play with the visual and auditory stimuli for a while, your senses become free from time and memory, and the scenery, beyond what you see in reality, becomes a city, a forest, the wind, and plays with the stars. And then the dancers awaken the sense of touch!　At that moment, the scenery becomes a part of one's own life, as if the internal and external, questions and sympathy, and the existence and consciousness of other experiencers in the theater space start a dialogue with one's own insights. It is an absolutely poetic experience, but also an entertainment that fully engages and entertains the senses.

Among the works of Rhizomatiks x ELEVENPLAY,
"border 2021" (updated) is an "art to feel" that can only be experienced by those who have been there.

The body, the concept, and the technology are all involved.
And like a 14th century textile, it's a dance and tech that are perfectly interwoven thoroughly through its detail.
Watching, being watched, peeking, being peeked at...
The horror on realizing that you have become a part of the work without even knowing it, and scare of as if you were in a place where you shouldn't be, or sensuality.
There are no verbal explanation, which makes me wonder many things and even worried.
And in terms of making me think about femininity.
Maybe, it's even ideological or political.

It's a work that doesn't even require words, so I'm sure it will be critically acclaimed overseas.
It's just wonderful.

Rhizomatiks' search for a fusion of digital and reality with Perfume, and MIKIKO's pursue of dance performance and the sophistication of the direction with ELEVENPLAY, which has been crystallized over many years, made this work like a rich spring water that can only be seen here in the world. This is the best mixed reality that can be achieved today, and I was moved by the experience.

Most works using VR/AR/MR rely too much on visual information, and it is unfortunate that the quality of those experience is degraded by the mismatch between the soundscape obtained from the auditory sense and the image drawn by the HMD. In "border 2021," however, the visual information from the MR, the audio from the headphones, as well as the PA sound from the venue that reaches the ears over the headphones, came together in the viewer's brain without any discrepancies at all, taking them to a world that they had never experienced before. What was interesting was that we were not just thrown into a virtual space, but during the performance, the dancers touched the feet and shoulders of the audience to reaffirm the reality of their own existence in the space. The viewer, whose movements are controlled by the personal mobility "WHILL," becomes aware of his or her own physicality, and at the same time starts to realize that he or she has become a part of the group choreography. Then, they realize that there are audience watching streaming remotely,,,,, to find out its meta-structure. At the end, they fall into the hands of the creators.

Real and virtual are borderless. When I watched the performance later, I was even more amazed. I didn't know they were doing that! I didn't know they were here!
And best of all, it was the most complicated wheelchair formation I've ever observed!

When I first came in, I thought that all the performers and the audience wearing masks was. Because it is made for the current times, but actually it was done in 2015 as it is.
The sense of the people at Rhizomatiks and ELEVENPLAY who were too ahead of the time.
This is a performance that I hope more people can see, or even continue to see for years.

Even my constrained body somehow became comfortable, and I indulged myself in the sensation of being lost in the mist and being pulled back again and again. The exquisite harmony of dancer and viewer, subject and object, particle and straight line, flat and curved surface, sound and dimension was beautiful.

1) Online (as a bystander)
The first thing I felt when I accessed the online website was the multiplicity of the experiencer as a party involved at offline: a passive "thing" that is moved by WHILL as well as a being (object or partner?) that is entangled with the dancer. At the same time, they are part of the stage set. From the point of view of the participants, they are "viewers" and "perceivers" in the midst of the dazzling world of MR.
Online, with its multiple perspectives and the freedom to switch between views, the real thrill of breaking various border can be felt, such as the MR of the scene and the real, or the dancer and the experiencer who rides on WHILL. However, it is only a stance of "outside observer" or "bystander".

2) Offline (as a party involved)
The experience of going offline the next day was overwhelming.
Various borders were creatively connected and interpenetrated in a way that had never been seen before (spatial, existential, reality [real space and MR], time axis including before and after the 10-minute experience...).
Although the performance at the site was only 10 minutes, I felt that the whole sequence, including before and after the experience, was a "work" with physical and psychological transformation. (The whole flow from checking in your luggage and listening to the briefing to being taken to the site, where you will be seated and equipped with your equipment.)

* Note: As to existence in real space. The "object", the "dancer", and the "experiencer" on WHILL, are animate and inanimate, or different in their stance, but actually similar (operating through programming and choreography). The physicality of the dancer, who moves mechanically, emerges as both objects and people are treated as equals.

3) About "border 2021" as a whole
From a structural point of view, there are firstly "online and offline". Offline, there are the experiences of the participants (the MR-based world, physical movement, occasional unexpected contact from the dancers...) and the subsequent experience as a spectator. The MR world itself has a multi-layered structure and development. This makes it an unprecedented work in which multiple structures are related in co-related manner.

With the situation with Covid-19, Rhizomatiks has made the most of the technological advances that have been made since the first performance at the border, and has also made a great leap forward in concept.

The time felt like being in a lucid dream.
A new world where space is expanded and virtual and real mixed together. Even my physical senses went nonsense.
I saw a city of the future in a comfortable virtual space.
This is something that is now at the pinnacle of comprehensive art.

Though the boundary between reality and unreality has now become so vague, its relationship gets to the phase where they have been eroded each other with this epoch-making work. In a world where there is no longer any reason for us to exist physically, all that is left is just emotion. Could it be that we are like a mass of emotions? It was an intense experience that made me think about such things.

Until now, the AR and VR media had not really resonated with me. However, after experiencing "border 2021," I have changed my mind a little. I wondered if the audiences who watched those early movies with a sense of attraction, when the movie media had just came around, would have thought that movies would developed this far today. I wonder if AR and VR will follow such a path.

It was a thrilling experience with various contrasts layered on top of each other: reality and false images, self and others, present and past.

How easy it is for human beings to be freed from ideas and enter a world of illusion. And can we expand our body and will so freely?
This was an unknown sensation that go beyond the angle or layers from which I have seen or experienced things so far.
I hope you will try this ultimate state of degeneration, where the perspectives of subject and the object are switched while you are immersed in an unreal world.

border is the first ever ""live"" media art.
The key is the midbrain. The midbrain integrates information such as audiovisual perception and the sense of balance, and the core of the midbrain is actually the sense of balance. When there is a "neurological alignment" between the body's sense of movement and the information felt by the left and right eyes, the cerebrum is instructed to "respect" the visual information because it is real (raw).
In other words, border presents all the beautiful CG and virtual dancers flowing in all directions as "real and textured", and I am very honored to have had the rare experience of "drifting my body and mind" through them.

It was emergence of a new type of opera.The entire body of the audience was immersed in a new reality created by the expansion of physical space. The viewer's eyes become dots and are moved freely within the space according to the director's intentions, but the music allows the audience to remain physically present by receiving it with the entire body. It is a multi-axis composition, but it never allows the audience to get lost.

A new body recognition created between human and technology. Running the edge of pleasure and escape between the boundary of the real and the virtual. I definitely felt the beginning of a new realm of art.

A drug-free trip" and "I don't want to leave this world" is the feeling that I got after experiencing "bprder2021".
I wore headset and headphones and rode in an autonomous wheelchair to be integrated into a space where dancers and mobility objects were waiting for me.
It was an ecstasy of being sucked into a world that I wanted, even though I could not move on my own will.
It's like a dream world, but with the warmth of reality, and the fear and pleasure of having your perception hacked.
"I hope that many people will be able to enjoy the feeling of having their senses hacked, the greatest of the highest quality.

I'm interested in the evolution of technology, but I'm not impressed usually. But I was moved by this "border 2021" while feeling the evolution of technological at its full! I think this is an excellent experiential content that is created with thorough thought through its detail on the creative side.
It shakes you emotionally from a variety of perspectives, such as the transition between reality, video, and AR, the transition between your position and that of the dancers and objects, and the transition between subjectivity and objectivity. The lingering pleasant feeling of wanting to immerse yourself in this world even more after watching it is something you have to experience!

As a result of the challenge to go beyond the border between the possible and the impossible, I felt there is new frontier (world) opening up beyond there. It was wonderful.
It was a cutting edge performance that perfectly synchronized the stage set, the audience, and the live dancers to create an unprecedented new experience. I felt that a new frontier had opened up over the border between the possible and the impossible. For a performance that could be described as if "sci-fi film in the flesh", the choreography was perfectly created from a first-person perspective and the dancers gave it shape with perfect precision, which were brilliant.

‘border 2021’ is a multi-sensory and multi-perspective experience that is a victory over linear viewing from home. Objects, lights, sounds, technology, and choreography come together in a unique blend that captivates the audience, and wraps the imagination with the infinite potential of the digital.

While the previous border and this border were not much different in terms of the content of the experience, the quality was completely different. During the experience, I felt like hit by so enormous amount of information that I felt dizzy, and after the experience, I bit my teeth and regret that this was realized before anyone else. There is no doubt that this is the most extreme form of experiential content that can be produced today.

border is the experiential contents that is created by the team based on a simple strategy: using the best technology available at the time.

In general, by information being combined with another information, a new and unexpected value will be generated. Until now, those kind of new values and information only have been created by being connected either in the digital space alone or in the real space alone. This is because information could not be equivalently connected over and beyond digital or real space. In the border space, however, it was different. Equivalent here means that there is no distinction at the cognitive level, in other words, the cognitive border disappears, and the connection becomes possible.

What is indicated by the border is a new form and possibility of reality. There are still many possibilities expanding in the 'reality' that is so commonplace and unquestioned, but we are missing.

It was the greates VR/AR production that I could think of at the moment. The visual, auditory, and tactile sensations were all immersive, and I was especially impressed by the perfect occlusion of dancers and real-time 3DCG!

It was my 3rd time experiencing a Rhizomatiks x ELEVENPLAY collaborative project. I really enjoyed discrete figures but border2021 went beyond what I saw before.

Being able to explore two different perspectives (that means two scenarios and two dance performances) is one of the strong points of border2021.

The experience chapter offers well-balanced VR and AR parts that empower the narrative and the dance performance. Regarding the viewing part, it offers an external point of view that gives a better understanding of all the aspects that compose the work.

Finally, the whole is enhanced by a powerful soundtrack along with a theatrical effort that makes the experience even more immersive.

Now I’m really curious about how this project can be expended through an online experience...

After five years, it has stepped into even more extraordinary level. I was moved by the fact that the technology and expression that Rhizomatiks and ELEVENPLAY have been exploring and developing over the years has been firmly incorporated into the work, and I was also moved by the fact that they are willing to explore even further. In other words, I was so excited that I even cannot imagine what I would have done if I had missed out on this experience.

It's rather floating feeling than an immersive experience with the world of the amazing depth of the 3D image and the great techno music.
Ahhh... I want to stay in this space longer. It made me feel like it.
It feels so good! The images are so beautiful.
A new experience where the digital world, the real world, and dance are mixed together at a high level.

I enjoyed the experience of a borderless fusion of the best AR and VR, real and virtual, body and geometry, performance and staging, lighting and video, music and sound. It was an art work that you "feel and experience" using all of your senses: vision, auditory, haptic, and smell, with incredible immersiveness. The quality of each element, such as dance, technology, music, and staging, was high and combined together into a complete work to give you an incredibly luxurious and rich experience. This time it was only for two days, but I hope more and more people can experience it. Thank you very much!