Marking the culmination of project Voice Quest: Saved Data in the City, 2025 artist fellow Fujishima Sacco holds the exhibition Re:Play at CCBT.
As the final output of her 2025 CCBT artist fellow project Voice Quest: Saved Data in the City, Fujishima Sacco holds the exhibition Re:Play featuring a new game installation.
Voice Quest: Saved Data in the City creates a game that challenges how we see the world by making visible the city’s buried voices, and building a space for dialogue with those with whom you have previously never interacted. Through such efforts as the dialogue-based sugoroku game workshops “SAVE 0: Mind Quest” held during the project, Voice Quest: Saved Data in the City has collected the sense of disquiet and murmurs that permeate the daily lives of urbanites.
Re:Play is a game installation with an urban setting. Visitors become players whose voices are collected through engaging in dialogue with in-game characters, and which then become part of the game space. Experience the process by which different values intersect and the voices hidden in the city emerge and circulate.
Artist Statement
Living in this city, we are constantly assigned roles and expected to perform them.
Gender, age, title, education, occupation, marital status, parent or child, caregiver or care recipient, able-bodied or a person with a disability, Japanese or foreigner; full-time, part-time, contract, or freelance worker; manager or subordinate—countless labels position us within society.
It can feel as though these roles were assigned to us long ago, and our true voice within us begins to sound like mere background noise.
The unease and suffocation we experience are often dismissed as “just complaints,” or mocked as “weakness.” It is not only others who render us invisible in this way; we do it to ourselves, too. Where, then, does this displaced noise go in the city?
While working on this project, I became pregnant. As my body and mind underwent change, my identity began to shift, and I found myself performing a nearly year-long role-play: becoming a mother. The noise between who I am and the role I was expected to play was slowly made invisible by the unquestionable logic of “because you’re a mother.”
And it is not only motherhood. We continue to play the roles society assigns us: “Because you’re a man.” “Because you’re already that age.” “Because you’re this nationality.” “Because you’re a manager.”…
Roles and social systems are complicit; together they tune us into players aligned with predetermined scripts. And now, our vast digitized data is being absorbed by AI, promising unprecedented processing power and efficiency. Is technology merely an apparatus of optimization, built upon the overwhelming volume of data produced by the majority, enabling the collective to survive more efficiently?
This work engages with that question. Within the framework of a game, I use AI and technology as devices to let the noise we emit reverberate throughout the city.
What appears here is not merely an NPC (Non-Player Character).
Though assigned roles, they exist in their own right — real, living voices.
In this place where the boundary between NPC and Player begins to waver, your reality will slowly begin to update: Re: Play.
Sacco Fujishima
Talk & Workshop:
Playing with Small Voices—Hacking the Efficient City through Play
Can rules of play help us overcome barriers of indifference to resonate more deeply with one another? As an event accompanying the Re:Play exhibition, this talk discusses games, social issues, and art, plus features a workshop where everyone plays a serious game together.
Date & Time: March 7, 2026 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm (last entry: 6:45 pm)
Venue: Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT] 3F
Admission: Free（advance reservation required)
Speakers: Fujishima Sacco(artist), Hori Jun(journalist, newscaster), Yoshida Hiroshi (Professor, University of Tokyo)
Workshop Instructor: Fujishima Sacco(artist)
Credits
Concept & Production: Fujishima Sacco
Game Development & Implementation: Nagamatsu Ayumu
Board Game Production Advisor: Osora Masato
Sound: LIU Chen
Installation Implementation: Imai Kyo
Exhibition Design: Hosono Takahito (OFF-FLAT)
Technical Direction: Kimura Yusuke (arsaffix)
Technical Staff: Miura Daiki (arsaffix), Nakaji Hiroaki (arsaffix), Otsuto Masashi (CCBT), Ueda Sen / Sen van der Heide (CCBT)
Technical Advisor: Hirase Miki
Design: Matsuda Hirokazu
PR & Experience Design: Asai Leo
SNS Promotion: Sega Miku
Photography: Yamashiro Koya
Video Documentation: Brent Rose (Tokyo Video Plus), Fujishima Kai (Tokyo Video Plus)
Project Management: Hara Izumi (CCBT), Ito Haruka (CCBT), Iwakura Kei, Kitahori Asumi
Production Management: Kato Naho (TASKO), Mukai Hiro (TASKO), Uehara Nonoka(TASKO)
In Collaboration with: The Big Issue Japan, Baby Sitter Tokyo
Organizer: Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT]
CCBT Art Incubation Program
One of CCBT’s core programs, the Art Incubation Program provides opportunities for creative talent to undertake new projects and makes those processes accessible to the public, facilitating forms of artistic expression, exploration, and action that change our city for the better. Selected through an open call, five artist fellows will act as CCBT partners, developing their projects, making the creative process public, exhibiting the results, and holding workshops and talks.
Project “Voice Quest: Saved Data in the City“
This project makes a game that shifts how we view the world by visualizing hidden voices in the city and creating places for dialogue with people we never interacted with before. The avatars that appear in the game are generated from the stories of actual inhabitants of the city. Players come into contact with those inhabitants’ lives and pain, encountering other values and lifeways. That experience is developed into an installation, and records of the dialogue are edited and published. Against a backdrop of generational, gender, national, economic, and ideological divisions, the project searches for ways to open up possibilities for a new commons from the intersection of voices.
