Hello, Error!

The essence of the tea ceremony is not simply drinking tea, but rather discarding the worldly illusions and enjoying the new illusions created within that space between the host and the guests. In the tea ceremony, various spatial devices, including outdoor spaces, are prepared to invite people from their busy daily lives into a pure spiritual world.

One of these devices is the “nijiriguchi,” a small entrance to the tea room. Due to its small size, guests naturally lower their heads as they enter. During Japan’s Warring States Period, there was a strong master-servant relationship, but through the nijiriguchi, everyone, including powerful lords, had to bow their heads and enter the tea room as guests, enjoying tea on an equal footing regardless of their social standing.

“The TEA-ROOM,” an art collective that expresses the material and spiritual aspects of the tea ceremony world using contemporary methods, attempts to explore the mechanism of illusion by extracting and expressing the “nijiriguchi”-like technology that neutralizes illusion through this work.

Humans possess perceptual biases, such as the “halo effect” (or “halo error”). There is no doubt that our preconceptions contribute to the reinforcement of power structures. In the age of deepfakes, where anyone can freely manipulate realistic falsehoods instantly using artificial intelligence, “nijiriguchi”-like technology is indispensable. Although the biases we have acquired over our long survival competition are not all bad, it is necessary to be conscious of what our tastes and actions are shaped by.

In “Hello, Error!”, videos of individuals with different genders, ages, and titles reading the same message are projected, and the viewer watches through the nijiriguchi. The work invites the viewers to experience for themselves how much their impressions differ depending on the speaker. By projecting onto screens suspended in multiple layers within the tea room, the appearance of the speaker is removed, and the voice is modified to eliminate the lower frequencies.