Dream machine: Asian philosophies meet Hollywood obsessions in Mariko Mori's high-tech meditation pod, recently on view in New York - On-Site

Perhaps more than any other contemporary Japanese artist, Mariko Mori captures the contradictions of contemporary Japan. Her works blend riffs on Shinto-Buddhist meditation wit slickly realized cyber fantasy, updating ancient rituals with 21st-century technology. They feel completely in tune with a culture that simultaneously embraces the Hello Kitty character an cherry blossoms, one that tucks Shinto shrine and Buddhist temples into alleyways behind gleaming corporate monoliths.

Mori's Wave UFO, which came to New York last spring under the auspices of the Public Art Fund, seems to smooth away such contradictions while actually bringing them to the fore. Wave UFO is giant white pod that appeared to have touche down in the glass atrium of a midtown office building. The pod is tear shaped, with an iridescent surface that almost glows. A set of petal-shaped steps leads from the floor up to a circular orifice that offers entry into the pod's surprising spacious interior.

Visitors--three could be admitted at a time--were instructed by white garbed attendants to remove their shoes. They were then hooked up to electrodes designed to monitor their brainwaves. A set of white plastic headrests invited each visitor to lie down and plug into a nearby socket. The light show that ensued was part interactive biofeedback and part graphic animation. For the first three minutes, visitors' brain impulses controlled the colors projected on the curving ceiling. Agitated thoughts turned a pair of elliptical orbs red, "wakeful relaxation" turned them blue and a dreamlike state (something I could not achieve) produced a yellow hue. Theoretically, if all three visitors were on the same wavelength, a ring of light would appear, 'although a technician hidden away in a nearby kiosk confessed that he had never seen this happen.

This biofeedback display was followed by a programmed light show consisting of colors encapsulated in floating bubbles or meandering off in vaporous streams. At the end of the show, visitors unplugged and descended to terra firma via the petal staircase. Total elapsed time was seven minutes.

Wave UFO, which cost around $1.5 million, is the latest of Mori's efforts to create environments for states of cyber enlightenment. An earlier version, Dream Temple, was designed for a single visitor and combined computer graphics and a real-time 3-D movie.

These environmental works complete Mori's transition away from the criticality of her early staged photographs. In those works, Mori assumes, with a whiff of sly feminist critique, the pose of various fantasy objects of Japanese males, including futuristic office girls and sew aliens. More recently she has made an effort to merge, without irony, the roles of Shinto goddess and cyber chick. Her works, which comprise photos, installations, videos and sculptures, are replete with kitschy imagery. An exhibition in 1999 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art included a video in which the artist, garbed in a peach-colored kimono, floated in the sky while cartoon musicians who seemed Asian kin to the Jetsons swooped by. Concurrent with the exhibition of Wave UFO, Deitch Projects presented the sculptural installation Oneness, a circle of translucent plastic aliens whose eyes glowed and hummed when one touched their hearts.

Despite this rather retrograde vocabulary, Mori's work feels sincere in its utopian ambitions. In interviews, she espouses a faith in universality, purity and progress, modernist notions that have become suspect in these darker times. Mori points to Buddhism, Shintoism and other Asian philosophies as sources for this hope. However, Wave UFO also suggests curious convergences with recent Hollywood obsessions such as telepathy and mind control. The programmed light show contained echoes of the network of mutant minds similarly depicted in the recent X-Men sequel (and, in fact, one of her technicians worked on that film). Meanwhile, the desire for mental conquest of material reality allies Wave UFO with one of the major themes of the Matrix movies.

Thus, despite the specific Japanesque trappings of much of Mori's work, she also seems to be touching on more widespread contemporary concerns about loss of personal interconnection, anxiety about the role played by technology in modern life and the fear that humanity is merging with its machines. Is there a convergence between Buddhism and digital technology? Is the Web a model of universal consciousness? Can we leave the body behind and find connection at the mental level? Or is it all just New Age nonsense?

In Mori's utopian vision, technology appears as mankind's savior, a notion that is at once seductive and quaintly old-fashioned. For visitors experiencing Wave UFO, entering the pod might seem like returning to the womb to he reborn. When it's over, you haven't been, of course, but there is no question that the momentary escape from reality has been restorative.

Mariko Moris's Wave UFO was on view in the atrium of at 590 Madison Ave., New York [May 10-July 31].