Interactive Media (Real-time rendering imagery using a game engine), 2025
LYMENA is an interactive video installation composed of an “inaccessible cave” inhabited by bats generated through a game engine, and the meditative flow of time that permeates the surrounding forest.
Hayama has long held a special fascination for bats, informed by a past experience assisting in the rehabilitation and return of Japanese house bats to the wild. To Hayama, bats are beings that inhabit a sensory world fundamentally different from that of humans, and that gesture toward another world beyond our own.
In this work, 3DCG functions as a substitute for the natural world—one that cannot truly be intervened in by human hands. Unlike conventional video games, the work removes goals such as conquest, achievement, or mastery.
On the screen, landscapes rendered in real time unfold continuously. At the center lies a cave inhabited by more than one hundred bats, yet its entrance is sealed, making entry impossible. As the work begins, a single bat flies out from the cave and continues flying somewhere through the world thereafter. By carefully searching the forest with both eyes and ears, viewers may become aware of its presence.
A control PC is placed behind the screen, where viewers can navigate and explore the world of LYMENA. The PC’s display is simultaneously projected onto the screen, allowing the experience to be shared with other viewers. When the system is not being operated, the screen presents views from multiple fixed cameras located throughout the virtual world.
The space of LYMENA emerges as a structure organized around an unreachable center. The “inaccessible cave” remains a domain that recedes the closer one attempts to approach it; yet remaining before its threshold opens up the possibility of another kind of relationship.