Back to the Future: Time Traveling to 1942

Abstract

Japanese new media artist Masaki Fujihata's exhibition and groundbreaking accompanying public augmented reality (AR) installation “BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration” remind us that even after eighty years, the ghost life of World War II Japanese American internment continues to haunt us. “BeHere/1942” revisits the War Relocation Authority's photographic history of the Japanese American incarceration experience using digital technology, including AR, which allows contemporary spectators to immerse themselves in the events of “relocation day” in the spring of 1942. Fujihata provides a new way of seeing, remembering, and experiencing photographs of the Japanese American wartime past in the present—empowered with contemporary media tools that are distinctly from what he calls “our own time”: AR.