I was wandering around Minami-Aoyama in Tokyo, which is a super posh-luxury brand retails neighborhood because I wanted to check out the Prada (or Pu-Ra-Da, as the Japanese pronounce it) store designed by architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron. It is, as most retail experiences in Tokyo, a world within its own world. I find it fascinating that there seems to be a nearly obsessive bent toward creating worlds within worlds; the details are lovingly, if not reverently and intensely recreated for that space, no matter how small (or large) it may be. This Prada store is different from the NY Prada store by Rem Koolhaas. There's an organicism that reminds me a bit of Gaudi - the exterior shell is like the microscopic latticework structure of corals or the cross section of a plant stem. Entering the building is like entering a gigantic underwater polyp with transparent skin. It is all designed to take you away from the fact that you exist on Planet Earth, that the store is on the intersection of X and Y Street, and in ABC City. Here, the experience is all about you and Prada. Afterwards, when I am putting together my collages, I am struck by an electric light pole that unceremoniously stood its ground and refused to relocate when I was taking the pictures. In the realm of such a fantastical building, it seemed like such a slap in the face: "Well, Hellooooh-OH, I don't care WHO you are, but I ain't moving nowhere cuz I wuz here first. This here is MY turf." It might as well stick a hip out and fold its arms. For all its prestige, money, technology, and brains, Prada can't do without these electric poles either. It's the infrastructure of the grid that any physical presence needs in order to function. I thought it was interesting that this juxtaposition of the sleek ultra-techno shell inspired by another world and an old-fashioned utilitarian (and rather ungroomed) presence have to make grudging peace and coexist. In the same vein, as we hurtle through the digital age, our lives are becoming increasingly about bits and bytes and fiction, whether in real space or in virtual. Technology creates vehicles to fantasy more than ever - video games, retail experiences, internet, avatars - there's even the Sims, an alternate parallel ego if you should choose to play the game. Somehow, the lines and the lightpoles in all its utilitarian glory holds its power over us, even though they are dismissed in its ordinariness. Without them, without the infrastructure, we would be back in the Dark Ages. Who knows perhaps in the future we will be able to harness enough solar and tofu-soy energy to run our households from self-sufficient batteries. Then we'd really be floating off the grid... Ultimately, this Prada piece asks the question of what is perceived reality or fantasy. The Prada building itself is an exercise in fantasy - an exclusive fantasy woven around the brand identity of the products the building showcases. Yet even as posh as its resources are, clues of "reality" stick out in the periphery like frayed edges on a beautiful garment. Or is this bit of "reality" what feeds into our fantasy? Our world is like constructed pieces of experiences, memories, blogs, uploads, downloads, all floating in a vast Babel that somehow, to each and everyone of us, makes sense.