Ars Electronica Garden Tokyo

Tokyo Garden

Japan Media Arts Festival Overseas Promotion

What is the benefit of an online festival? How we can make the most of this unfortunate but unique opportunity? Tokyo Garden will be a place where we exhibit current Japanese artists’ works, and invite us to trace the origin of Japanese Media Art through talks, interviews and a sharing archive.

KEY: Online, 2020, TOKYO, CONTEXT, ARCHIVE, LIVE, Map the new world.

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Tokyo Garden

Tokyo Garden is an online place where we all can explore the origin of Japanese Media Art. As William Gibson describes in his novels, Tokyo is a city of cyber, high-tech and a uniquely wired culture. Why? We will try to find an answer, tracing where, how and from whom our media artists’ roots originate. For this challenge, we are planning to contents such as talks with different artists and curators, virtual studio tours, a sharing archive, and current artists’ work, including winners of the Japan Media Arts Festival 2020. Of course, we will also have many entertainment programs with DJs and artists. We hope you can virtually visit Tokyo, enjoy it and think together about the future of media art.

Tokyo Garden is hosting a portal website for various Japanese creators and organizations who have played an important role in Japan’s media art scene such as ICC and Dommune, with their original exhibitions and performances in association with Ars Electronica 2020. Dommune, for example, was founded in 2010 by artist Naohiro Ukawa, and was Japan’s first live streaming studio and channel. Monday through Thursday, it has been streaming for five hours a day for ten years, experimenting with live video delivery in an era where the traditional concepts of “broadcasting”, “publishing” and “advertising” are going bankrupt. In collaboration with Tokyo Garden, Dommune will showcase new possibilities for visual communication at Ars Electronica Festival.

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Event: Live-Streaming programs: Lenna - Sound installation for personal computer/ Miyu Hosoi (JP)
Event: Live-Streaming programs: Lenna – Sound installation for personal computer/ Miyu Hosoi (JP)
Credit: Keizo Kioku, NTT Intercommunication Center [ICC]
Last Words / TypeTrace, dividual inc. / Dominique Chen (FR), Takumi Endo (JP)
Last Words / TypeTrace, dividual inc. / Dominique Chen (FR), Takumi Endo (JP)
Credit: Dominique Chen (FR)
Exhibition: Black Aura Re-Reversal / ReKOGEI (JP)
Exhibition: Black Aura Re-Reversal / ReKOGEI (JP)
Credit: 2018 ReKOGEI
Reminiscence of the Unknown, Image and Matter || Digitally Natural, Naturally Digital || Sehnsucht nach Masse, Yoichi Ochiai (JP)
Reminiscence of the Unknown, Image and Matter || Digitally Natural, Naturally Digital || Sehnsucht nach Masse, Yoichi Ochiai (JP)
Credit: Yoichi Ochiai (JP)
Exhibition: Air on Air/ Yasuaki Kakehi (JP), Daisuke Akatsuka (JP), Juri Fujii (JP), Yoshimori Yoshikawa (JP), Joung Min Han (KR)
Exhibition: Air on Air/ Yasuaki Kakehi (JP), Daisuke Akatsuka (JP), Juri Fujii (JP), Yoshimori Yoshikawa (JP), Joung Min Han (KR)
Credit: Yasuaki Kakehi (JP)

Timetable

Program

Behind the scene of “Terminal Slam”
Daito Manabe (JP), Kenichiro Shimizu (JP)

As a visual expression that further enhances the splendor of music, this work showed us the urban landscape of the city created with Diminished Reality (making what is there invisible) and not using AR/VR/MR.

Lenna – Sound installation for personal computer
Miyu Hosoi (JP)

I’ve heard it said that sound, namely voice, created by human structures has too different a resolution for artificial sounds created with tens of thousands of lines of programming. In this work, Lenna uses her own voice as a medium, and by designing the equipment and space with precision, it feels like an experiment in which the entire space becomes music.

YOICHI OCHIAI × JAPAN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA VOL.3
Japan Philharmonic Orchestra (JP), Yoichi Ochiai (JP), Hikaru Ebihara (JP), Yoko Ebara (JP), WOW (JP), Kazuhiro Naruse (JP), TBWA\HAKUHODO Team (JP)

More than 90 years after the introduction of the orchestra to Japan, its mannerisms have not changed much, but in an age when the human senses can be expanded through the control of various devices, sensors, light and visuals, how can classical music be delivered to various people? The series continues to challenge the expansion.

Rewinding the History of Japanese Media Art
Ai Hasegawa (JP), Akinori Goto (JP), Ken Furudate (JP), Michiko Tsuda (JP), Minoru Hatanaka (JP), Seiichi Saito (JP)

The history of Japanese media art is very diverse and profound, and it has found various new frontiers. This talk session explores the history of modern Japanese media art in reverse chronological order.

Rhizomatiks presents PLAYING TOKYO Vol.09 “Special Edition”
Seiichi Saito (JP), Carsten Nicolai (DE), Kazunao Abe (JP), Marko Peljhan (SI), Yukiko Shikata (JP), Daito Manabe (JP)

“Staying TOKYO” originally started as “Flying TOKYO,” the talk and workshop event we have been holding since 2009 inviting some of the renowned international artists with whom Daito Manabe has a close relationship. Since the self-restraint advice by the Japanese government, the event has evolved as “Staying TOKYO” and has been running online every week. The first half of the event is a remote talk session with me, Seiichi Saito, inviting guests, and the second half is DJ/VJ session led by Daito Manabe and the engineers at Rhizomatiks introducing online experiments and tool development. Now that self-restrain advice is pull off, with the end of the emergency declaration, we changed the name to “PLAYING TOKYO” and shifted to a new phase to try to include the audience as much as possible in our expressive activities in real space. What can artists do now and what should they do in the field of entertainment? This is a “PLAYING TOKYO: Special Edition” by Rhizomatiks.

Black Aura Re-Reversal
ReKOGEI (JP)

One would accept change for the sake of not changing. Craft is appreciated when it is continuous, but it creates new possibilities when things change unintentionally. This work represents Urushi today, a traditional craft technique passed on to generations in Takaoka City, Toyama Prefecture.

Synesthasia Garden
Daisuke Yamashiro (JP)

Yamashiro, who has the unique ability to “involve” various things, has created a work that involves the power of Takanabe-cho in Miyazaki Prefecture, where he created this work, and the five senses of the audience. It is a landscape, and the space itself is a piece of music, a device that allows us to feel time.

Reminiscence of the Unknown, Image and Matter || Digitally Natural, Naturally Digital || Sehnsucht nach Masse
Yoichi Ochiai (JP)

This work is a documentation of Ochiai’s the exhibition filled with his confrontation with nature and his deep spirit of inquiry makes us reflect on the time when the relationship between nature and the human being must be reconstructed, so-called Anthropocene, and the many lives that we are forced to recognize through the Covid-19.

Museum inside Network 91 Revisited
Akihiro Kubota (JP), Kazuhiko Hachiya (JP), Koichiro Eto (JP), Yukiko Shikata (JP), Minoru Hatanaka (JP), Seiichi Saito (JP)

NTT ICC in 90s represented an exhibition without reality? This session will invite panelist to think about what media art can do for society in the present day and age, referring to past examples.

Vocalise
Miyu Hosoi (JP)

The vibrations of voices in the air create a recognizable sound that spreads through space. Through the Internet, it transcends location and is delivered to the audience. We hope that people all over the world will enjoy her live performance at Ars, where she experiments with her own voice.

Soundform No.1
Natura Machina / Yasuaki Kakehi (JP), Mikhail Mansion (US), Kuan-Ju Wu (TW)

Media may have been very primitive by nature. Electronic music and visuals were born from the complexity of chemical reactions and information transfer processes that led to the creation of devices and their intentional manipulation. This work brings us back to primitive ways of thinking, where such complexity has become the norm today.

Last Words / TypeTrace
dividual inc. / Dominique Chen (FR), Takumi Endo (JP)

In this era, the body and words = memory became a different way of storing things. The internet has become the norm, and people’s words are stored somewhere that has no concrete place in the cloud, which becomes an extended memory. Even when the body disappears, it keeps going and continues to affect someone else.

EUPHRATES
Masahiko Sato (JP), Masashi Sato (JP)

The process and how EUPHRATES create their work remains unknown. Under what kind of environment EUPHRATES continues to create numbers of works with variety in the choice of media, including educational television programs, picture books, and the video work that won the award at the 23rd Japan Media Arts Festival, which expresses a different point of view from the usual.

Role of Media Art
Etsuko Ichihara (JP), Nao Tokui (JP), Natsumi Wada (JP), Shiho Fukuhara (JP), Asako Tomura (JP), Minoru Hatanaka (JP)

Japan Media Arts Festival, which was founded in Japan, focuses on the field of art, entertainment, manga and anime, and is becoming more and more centripetal in its inclusion of various fields. What is the role of media arts in this context? This session the panelist will be discussing the future of media art along with the unique setting of this year’s Ars Electronica to be held online.

#JapanRevisited202x
Austrian Cultural Forum (AT/JP)

In a matter of weeks, artists around the globe have suddenly found themselves surrounded by a haze of uncertainty. Art fairs, residencies and festivals are postponed, in-person collaborations are cancelled and international travel has all but disappeared. As an encouragement to keep pushing forward and to break this mist of uncertainty, the Austrian Cultural Forum Tokyo has launched #JapanRevisited202x.

Air on Air
Yasuaki Kakehi (JP), Daisuke Akatsuka (JP), Juri Fujii (JP), Yoshimori Yoshikawa (JP), Joung Min Han (KR)

We live in an age where information can be transformed into various forms, and AI will evolve by analyzing this data, and this will change the times. What does this bring to us? What does it feel like to transform information and then revert it back to the original information? Perhaps our senses and sensibilities will be expanded by experiencing the sensation of breathing on a bubble somewhere in the world that will be reborn. I invite you to experience this experimental experiment.

Shadows as Athletes (short version)
Masahiko Sato (JP), Masashi Sato (JP), Masaya Ishikawa (JP), Tomoko Kaizuka (JP)

Director’s message: It’s not just artists that aspire to be as good as Masahiko Sato, but many people in creative fields such as advertising. His ideas are pure, unadulterated and simple. That’s why they bring out the beauty that is not created by adding on to them, but rather the beauty that can only be seen when you change your perspective.

Yasuaki Kakehi Laboratory, The University of Tokyo
Yasuaki Kakehi (JP)

Under what kind of environment do they continue to create works which are part of University lab’s research? What equipment do you use? What kind of process do students carry out? We take a deep dive into the Lab from different perspectives, including how Ars Electronica is positioned for education.

SUPER DOMMUNE tuned by au5G Presents “TOKYO REAL”
Naohiro Ukawa (JP), Seiichi Saito (JP), Ei Wada (JP), Yamakawa Fuyuki (JP), ZVIZMO / Tentenko(JP), Atsuhiro Ito, (JP)

Created by artist Ukawa, DOMMUNE has been running for over 10 years and has been fusing academia, music, entertainment and art together in a live setting. This experimentation, methodology and way of creating online shows has influenced many people around the world and has been a big influence in the various online developments at Covid-19.

Yamaguchi Garden / YCAM Garden of Threads
Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] (JP)

In this event we have produced two pieces of content, 1) the sound performance “sound tectonics #24 MYSTIC RHYTHM” by the Indonesian group SENYAWA and Japanese artist Kakushin Nishihara, and 2) the online sound artwork “quartets online” by musician Yoshihide Otomo and others.

Project Credits / Acknowledgements

Seiichi Saito (JP)
Creative Director, Rhizomatiks
Director of TOKYO GARDEN,
Japan Media Arts Festival Overseas Promotion

Biography

To promote outstanding works oversears, the Japan Media Arts Overseas Promotion, organized by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, has hosted exhibitions, screenings, and presentations focusing on award-winning works from the Japan Media Arts Festival. We are releasing information online about the artists and locally deployed specialists, with several special exhibitions planned throughout the year.

Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan
Playing Tokyo

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Press kit PDF (EN)