Fumito Ueda's Slow Route to Perfection

In 1994, long before the celebrated video-game designer Fumito Ueda went to work for Sony, he took part in a competition that the company sponsored for young artists. Having made it through the opening rounds, Ueda, then a recent graduate of the Osaka University of Arts, used the thousand-dollar allowance Sony gave him to create an installation in a shopping complex in Yokohama. He set up a small cage, the kind a pet owner might buy for a parakeet, and filled it with mounds of soil. Then he cut claw marks into the bars and positioned a sign in front of the cage explaining that it was home to a subterranean cat. Whenever a mall-goer approached, Ueda, observing from nearby, would push a button on a remote control, activating a pair of motors that kicked dirt into the onlooker's face.