I’m an Artist / filmmaker and otaku. Otaku is a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests, commonly Anime, Manga and Japanese pop/sub-culture. It has been compared with mental sickness: ‘They’ say we’re perverted by imagery and moe, we lack basic social skills, empathy, even self-awareness.
To me otaku culture is not a symptom of entertainment consumerism, neither is it a disease; it’s a global avant-garde that can offer strategies to cope with (and survive) our current state of postmodern myopic. Today we are confronted with the first signs of what will become a highly complex, multilayered and super dense technological environment. Already now image and world are in many cases just versions of each other. Otaku are extremely aware of this and see image and life as one: Animated Life. A self-improving mind set that is able to (re-)question identity, sexuality and our relationship with technology and future forms of life.
Animated Life is our relationship with a 2D significant other. It is that moment when Anime becomes aware of the gaze, when voyeurism is answered with seduction, when a character comes alive ...
Otaku is not an escape from reality; it’s a choice for a better fiction than reality, the fiction shared most widely. I research these potential(s) and create audio-visual art and books as vessels of cultural exchange: Visual anthropology on the islands of our modern day Crusoe.