Audiovisual concert, 2019
subassemblies is a project that pursues the relationship between natural and human-made structures through a perspective of architectural scale. It consists of several different presentation formats such as concert, installation, prints (sculptures) and screening.
The main sources of this project are 3D data from laser scanning, thermal images and filmed footage of human-made architecture, ruins and nature, and those are distorted and reconstructed into modules as subassemblies to create a renewed timeline with layers of order and disorder while revealing the force of both nature and art.
Ruins, buildings invaded by nature, and architectures in disrepair are superimposed and rebuilt dynamically, and rendering those unusual characteristics in multi-layered depth extends the perception of floating – not only between natural and human-made structures, but also between abstract and concrete phenomena through transition, destruction and renaturation. The motions such as cancellation of physical law, hybrid of natural and artificial components, and transposition of entropy and negentropy enhance those unusual characteristics.
Project Credits:
- Concept, direction, composition, programming: Ryoichi Kurokawa
- Producer: Nicolas Wierinck
- Co-production: LOXOSconcept/Foundation Matera-Basilicata 2019
- Produced by Studio RYOICHI KUROKAWA
Biography:
Ryoichi Kurokawa, b. 1978 in Osaka (JP), lives and works in Berlin. He works with a wide range of mediums but is most famous for his audiovisual installations, usually composed of multiple screens where abstract motifs suddenly appear from the dark and multiply or break away as if being microscopically dissected.
These images and movements are paired with rippling, throbbing, swiveling sounds that feel as though they are coming from a deep place. The moving images that appear on the screen resemble outer space movements of particles, a process of complex chemical reactions, often seeming to be building up to an explosion. In some works, the motifs take on a more visually organic form, such as water streams or droplets that move across the screen. Kurokawa’s works visually translate the law of order in elements and the force of energy.
As can be seen from his works, Kurokawa states that nature is his principle source of inspiration. All of his works are grounded in this notion of hybridization. They straddle analog and digital, but also time and space, the full and the fragmentary, the simple and the complex, the reactive and the contemplative, the auditory and visual.
Audio and visual concordance are key in Kurokawa’s works. He considers both the audio and visual element as different vectors of a unique piece and insists that they have to flow together to enter a collision at the same time.
Whether the recordings of waterfalls dissolve into white noise while simultaneously forming an almost spiritual and reverential stillness around the viewer, or whether field recordings in combination with computer-generated structures like glitch minimalism coexist in harmony in an un-harmonious, terrifying world of war and destruction: Ryoichi Kurokawa invents and presents an audiovisual language where complexity and simplicity alternate and combine in a fascinating synthesis.
Ryoichi Kurokawa is a true poet of the transformative cinema, lyrically transfiguring the analogue representations of perceived nature into digital streams of vertiginous imagery & emotion. The architecturally crafted precision of his sensitively synched fragmentary images placed side by side on our retina, tends to displace the persistence of blurred memory under the effect of boundless luminosity.
Ryoichi Kurokawa was born in 1978 in Osaka and is currently based in Berlin. He has been producing and presenting his audio-visual artworks all over the world since 1999. Kurokawa describes his works as time-based sculptures and considers sound and image as a single unit. His works are a composition of symphonies, both imagined and produced as well as recorded. With the combination of video material and computer-generated aesthetics, this changes how the spectator views the familiar. Kurokawa has done significant collaborative works throughout his career, most notably his collaboration with Vincent Minier—an astrophysicist and researcher at CEA-IRFU—to create the immersive and tactile audiovisual installation based on data produced by the satellites of the European Space Agency, NASA, and more specifically by the Herschel space telescope.
Some of Kurokawa’s significant solo and group exhibitions and performances include objectum, Takuro Someya Contemporay Art (Japan 2018), Coder le Monde, Centre Pompidou (France 2018), The Dream Of Forms, Palais de Tokyo (France 2017), unfold, FACT (England 2016), Ordered Disorder, Espacio Fundacion Telefonica (Peru 2015), Turbulences, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton (France 2012), One of a Thousand Ways to Defeat Entropy – The 54th Venice Biennale (Italy 2011), transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Germany 2010), and Synthesis, Tate Modern (England 2007).
