The Bigface boxes appear at the Ars Electronica

Ars Electronica is a media arts centered festival held in the small town of Linz, Austria.
Since it focuses on media arts, you won't see the usual oil paintings or sculptures on display, but rather art pieces made with computers or projectors.

For example this one.

Although media arts is still a rather new field, the ceremony was attended by the town mayor along with members of the EU, with everyone formally dressed. They were drinking cocktails at the lounge as well. Rather than counterculture, it was super main culture.

Also, there are some awards held at the Ars Electronica. Up until now some of the only Japanese winners have been Maywa Denki, Rhizomatiks (who take care of Perfume's performances), and Ryuichi Sakamoto. What I want to say with all this is that "It's extremely well done".

It's not like we won a pass to the Ars Electronica (we didn't apply), we were invited. Some staff member happened to see the large face masks workshop we presented in April at Osaka. At first they asked if we would like to put the same thing on display.

However this is a workshop that takes about 2 hours per participant. Besides, the instructions must be given in German to the Austrian visitors. It seemed impossible to achieve.
If this was in the style of a NHK professional it would go like "I will take the job" and then a narration would begin, but in our case we just ran away.

For the Maker Faire Tokyo we created face enlarging boxes made with lens so, we told them that we had something even better and they allowed us to change the contents of the exhibition.

We couldn't manage to take a group photo so we just put individual pictures together, but it ended up looking like an Outrage movie poster. Everyone with huge heads.

We prepared a total of 18 head enlarging boxes. You must be this ready if you're visiting the hometown of the House of Habsburg (I studied some Austrian history before our trip. Once there, I realized I should have studied the language).

This is our new face enlarging box model, we made a version with 4 sides.

Not only the front side of your face, but also the sides and back of your head will be enlarged. The sides look very funny when you slowly turn around. We went with it and enlarged even the back of the head.

And so into the real deal. The exhibition was held on September from the 9th to the 11th.

Seeing people from a foreign country having fun putting cardboard boxes over their heads gave us a very strange feeling of accomplishment. I thought the same when we did the banknotes bathtub in San Francisco but, I'm glad we could interact with such a distant and foreign country like Austria.

You can also see me making a smug face in the background on the picture above. About 500 people tried our boxes over the course of the 3 days, I think.

The one next to me in the left picture is the Hebocon organizer from Austria. As you would expect from the person managing Hebocon, he just went on to put a box over his head and struck a pose. I wonder if he would like to become a writer for Daily Portal Z.

The girls to the right were quite the beauties so our tech expert Yoshida talked them into trying the boxes (what a gallant man), although it's hard to appreciate their good looks with such huge heads.

People would show some smiles when seeing me approach them with a huge head but, it's no surprise that they would laugh the most when seeing the familiar faces of their lover or friends become huge.

It was the same for Japan, although I saw a kid laugh so much at the huge face of his mother that I thought he was going crazy.

The fun multiplies when the huge face you are seeing is a familiar one. It's also much more fun to listen to the bad singing of a close person in the karaoke than going with a professional singer, maybe it's the same thing.
How it blended with their own inside jokes was part of the charm. It's a good thing to learn.

And also, just like Japanese people, they would start making weird expressions with their enlarged faces. Some sort of strange nature would show itself.

The Ars Electronica exhibition was full of wonderful stuff but that is not to say we did not meet with any trouble.

1. The cardboard boxes wouldn't arrive
We had the cardboard boxes needed to make the head enlarging boxes sent beforehand but they were held in customs. I heard the reason was that they thought just sending some cardboard boxes seemed unnatural and wondered if we were planning to sell them.

At first I thought "Why the heck would we resale cardboard boxes!?" but we settled for buying some more at the home center store nearby and forgot about the whole deal. We should have done that from the start.

Just by looking at these pictures I could feel a psychological distance shorten between us. One would be left thinking "Huh? Was Linz some sort of place running along the Chuo Line?"

Also, some boy who looked like he belonged in the Vienna Boys' Choir really got into the boxes, he came to try them like 4 different times in a single day. I was relieved to find out young boys enjoy doing silly things no matter where you go.

The Ars Electronica exhibition was full of wonderful stuff but that is not to say we did not meet with any trouble.

1. The cardboard boxes wouldn't arrive
We had the cardboard boxes needed to make the head enlarging boxes sent beforehand but they were held in customs. I heard the reason was that they thought just sending some cardboard boxes seemed unnatural and wondered if we were planning to sell them.

At first I thought "Why the heck would we resale cardboard boxes!?" but we settled for buying some more at the home center store nearby and forgot about the whole deal. We should have done that from the start.

The cardboard boxes finally arrived after we paid the additional customs fee.

2. We had no idea what was written anywhere

We could understand each other well enough speaking in English (like with the taxi driver or at the shops), however, the instructions were all written in German.

There aren't any relevant photos left but there's a bunch of sausage pictures. I was surprised to see it become some sort of Instagram album.

I tried to say that we faced some trouble too, but in hindsight they weren't a big deal. The townsfolk were very kind and the taxi never tried to rip us off so it felt like a very safe town.

We got asked a lot how these BigFace boxes were made so I decided to write out the instructions in detail.

Take a look at this and try it for yourself. Of course, that doesn't mean that this is the one right way to make them, I would be glad if you tried out many alternatives by changing the size of the boxes or the lens.

We made a website dedicated to the BigFace Project which includes both the face enlarging boxes as well as the papercraft ones from before.

Its design has a very nostalgic good old Internet feeling to it.