21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

Hans Ulrich Obrist (curator)

Curator and writer, director of the Serpentine Gallery in London since 2006. He is known for his interdisciplinary approach, working not only with artists but also with architects, scientists, designers, film directors, choreographers, and philosophers. He is involved in many online exhibitions, and his recent gaming exhibition "WORLDBUILDING Gaming and Art in the Digital Age" is currently touring internationally.

1.A New Way of Looking at Games: Play-Theater
The metaverse is a worldview created by its participants. Who contributes to the creation of this world, and who is it shared by? These artist-created game images with a certain metaphorical beauty will unfold differently for each player. We propose a new interface for everyone to appreciate these images.

2.Clothing: Wearing the Digital
Digital clothing is not just an extension of bodily functions or a means of acquiring data, as with the Apple Watch. Digital interventions into the act of wearing clothes leads to a diversity of sensibilities and tastes, and allows for greater freedom of choice. The use of AR for fashion shows and fittings, the generation of designs in collaboration with AI, and the use of digital technology to change the materials that react to light and sound all promise to broaden the range of artistic expression.

3.Housing: Environment/Digital
The emergence of AI is lowering barriers to the process of designing living spaces and furniture. The ability to intervene in the architectural process will bring about a shift in our consciousness of living, while the digital will enhance our ability to imagine (create) space and transform it.

4.Food: Ingesting Data
Taste seems to be the sense with the greatest distance from the digital world. Today, we see a wide range of challenges being tackled, from artistic expression to medical purposes, where our sense of taste is considered to be a new medium. In this world, the taste of candy can be changed through digital stimuli, virtual salt intake can be put into practice as a means of reducing salt, and another way of eating (diet) can be realized by “ingesting” data.

5.Living with AI: to what extent can AI acquire a sense of humanity?
Beyond machine learning, AI will become autonomous, capable of making its own decisions and expressing emotions. This sense of autonomy will take shape in a complementary relationship with us humans, which is both a mirror of us and a showcase of the possibilities of a new kind of humanity. What do they teach us about the meaning of this “new humanity”?

6.Buying the Digital: The New Materiality of the Digital
NFTs have won a kind of authenticity as a digital art form that cannot be tampered with, opening up not only the market value of digital art, but also new audiences and collectors, as well as the possibilities of artistic expression itself. The infrastructure and system of “value” and “exchange” called NFTs will kick off a new circulatory system of artistic and cultural values.

7.Data and New Artistic Expression: Painting and Installation
The relationship between data and creation has begun to go beyond the visualization of data such as research findings and information, and the creation of three-dimensional objects using 3D printers. A new alchemy of media is being realized one after another through the digital, such as painting with data as “paint,” or using the heat generated by data processing to create sculptures.

8.Radical Pedagogy
With the impending Singularity where AI will soon surpass humans, conventional education can no longer adequately respond to the new situation. From tutorial videos that teach birds how to fly, to restoration programs that use AI to rebuild abandoned buildings, to biosimulation, these proposed 11 programs showcase a novel pedagogy that may help us to survive the future.

Keiken

Keiken is an artist collective, co-founded by Tanya Cruz, Hana Omori, and Isabel Ramos in 2015. Based between London and Berlin, they come from mixed diasporic backgrounds (Mexican/Japanese/European/Jewish). They are collaboratively building and imagining speculative futures to simulate and test-drive new structures and ways of existing. Tethered to the idea of experience, Keiken explores the nature and future of consciousness in every facet of
their practice.
Morphogenic Angels, Keiken’s current ongoing world-building project, is an ever-evolving universe set 1000 years from now, unfolding in a radically different time and space that transcends our current reality. It explores a future where people have gained post-human capabilities through the organic reengineering of their cells, therefore tapping into non-human consciousness. In this future world, post-human entities are now considered “Angels,” and they value and draw from all kinds of consciousness; ancestral, bodily, extraterrestrial, as well as animal, nature, cellular, and the cosmos.
The installation can be experienced in one of two ways. As a player, visitors can take control of the "angel" and embark on a journey to understand the future world. Within an immersive installation that encourages rest and pondering, visitors are invited to discover the genesis story behind Keiken’s speculative world.
https://keiken.cloud/
Commissioned by: Hebbel Am Ufer (HAU)

Tomihiro Kono

Tomihiro Kono is a wig artist and a pioneer in bringing wigs to stylish alternative fashion. His wigs, reminiscent of unidentified creatures made of colorful human hair adorned with beads and rhinestones, have been highly acclaimed by renowned artists. Recently, he has created wigs for Björk and New Jeans.
In the pandemic-hit 2020, he presented an AR filter for virtually trying on wigs. This exhibition features the updated version of the AR filter, as well as installations composed of real wigs. Please come and stand in front of the monitor―you too can metamorphose into unidentified creatures. The spread of COVID-19 significantly altered our relationship with fashion. For example, it is still fresh in our minds that virtual fittings to virtually try on clothes have become essential for when we were unable to visit physical stores. Kono’s AR filter can be considered a pioneering example. The unidentified creature-looking wigs appear on the screen as if they are parasitizing humans, kindling the viewer’s imagination about trans-species (existence transcending the separation of species).
http://www.tomihirokono.com/

ANREALAGE

Exhibition Period: 2023.Oct.7 (Sat.) - 2024.Jan.8 (Mon.)

ANREALAGE is a fashion brand established by designer Kunihiko Morinaga in 2003. The brand name consists of a mixture of A REAL (the everyday), UN REAL (the extraordinary), and AGE (the times). Adhering to the motto “God is in the details,” the brand presents clothes that adopt the latest technology.
This installation features the following four collections presented during the pandemic from 2020 to 2022: S/S 2021 COLLECTION “HOME,” A/W 2021-22 COLLECTION “GROUND,” S/S 2022 COLLECTION “DIMENSION,” and A/W 2022-23 COLLECTION “PLANET.” During the pandemic, the significance of what we wear on our bodies was put into
question. However, it was amid this adversity that ANREALAGE launched a succession of concepts that challenged the preconceptions of fashion.
This exhibit will not only showcase the present state of ANREALAGE, which has long been grappling with the relationship between digital and fashion, but will also demonstrate the direction of post-pandemic fashion, questioning the boundaries between what is real and what is digital.
https://www.anrealage.com/

HATRA+Yuma Kishi

Exhibition Period: 2024.Jan.13 (Sat.) - March.17 (Sun.) (tentative period)

HATRA is a Tokyo-based fashion brand that proposes liminal wear and
explores the body through 3D cross-simulation and generative AI. Yuma Kishi is a Japanese artist who creates digital works and sculptures using AI. His work is based on Western and Asian art history and attempts to distort our perception of aesthetics. This time, the duo will work as a unit to develop a three-way dialogue system between MaryGPT, ChatGPT, and humans, and to interrogate the relationship between the three through clothing.
HATRA
Yuma Kishi

VUILD

A world where people other than architecture specialists can also freely conceive of architecture. VUILD, an architecture startup founded by Koki Akiyoshi in 2017, has achieved the social implementation of such a world. With a mission to democratize architecture so that everyone can become a creator through the power of technology, the company is engaged in a wide range of businesses. The EMARF service, one such example, allows users to complete everything online from woodworking design to parts processing, and delivers the processed parts to the user as if printing the parts out. VUILD not only provides platforms, but also creates innovative buildings that no one has ever seen before by utilizing the technologies it has developed in-house.
This exhibition features an exhibit running for the entire six-month duration of the exhibition. Specifically, visitors verbalize their imaginary ideas, and AI generates 3D models from their words. Then, based on the 3D data, the models are actually made on site using Shopbot, a CNC wood router machine. This installation with VUILD’s diverse services proposes new ways of creating architecture and cities.
https://vuild.co.jp/
In cooperation with: KOKUYO Co., Ltd.

GROUP

GROUP is an architectural collective consisting of Gaku Inoue, Takahiro Ohmura, Naoki Saito, Kumiko Natsumeda and Ken Akatsuka. Considering an architectural project as an opportunity for temporary but continuous collaboration with members of different specialties, it develops activities with a critical eye that focus on the interrelationships between architecture, art, politics, labor, and urban history.
This exhibit explores the possibility of virtual architecture by utilizing AR (Augmented reality) technology. It sees architecture not just as a structure, but a means of communication and interacting with the environment. This work, Involvement/Rain/Water passage, uses AR technology to translate rainfall data of Kanazawa over 141 years into a
visual format. Visitors are able to experience the virtual realm unfolding in the space accessed through their mobile phones. It offers an intuitive understanding of weather patterns and precipitation variations, as well as new insights into the architecture-natural environment interactions. GROUP also proposes a digital handout, which not only spatially connects the scattered exhibition rooms, but also allows interactive exploration of exhibits and information, and the sharing of information between exhibition rooms. It demonstrates that architecture does not only belong to the physical space, but is also compatible with the digital space.
https://sites.google.com/groupatelier.jp/group/
In cooperation with: Takashi Suzuki (MULTRA), GRID INC., JATO Co.,Ltd., BOSE

MANTLE (Shu Isaka + Soshi Nakamura)

MANTLE is an art collective formed by Shu Isaka and Soshi Nakamura, two artists who explore filmic expression. They strive to access all kinds of site-specificity, simulating and re-editing phenomena that we cannot directly observe and those spanning over short and long periods of time—a timescale beyond that of humans. Their works even playfully integrate accidental factors and errors occurring during the process, in pursuit of the spatiotemporal critical zone between the present and the future.
This work, Simulation #4 -The Thunderbolt Odyssey, explores electricity—the powerhouse of digital technology—and lightning. Kanazawa is in fact considered Japan’s lightning hotspot. The work visually simulates how a random lightning strike affects urban spaces, geography, and the landscape. Lightning simulation with a random nature is akin to loading new technology data onto the Earth’s surface. The lightning on the screen flashes from a cumulonimbus cloud to an upside-down lightning rod. Who is this lightning rod protecting? With its purpose left unclear, the rod appears as a critical point where technology and natural phenomena intersect.
Shu Isaka
Soshi Nakamura
In cooperation with: Takashi Suzuki (MULTRA), GRID INC., JATO Co.,Ltd., BOSE

Homei Miyashita Laboratory, Meiji University

Homei Miyashita Laboratory has pioneered the field of edible digital media by focusing on the sense of taste as a digitally reproducible medium. It has developed a taste analysis and reproduction device that reproduces the flavors of food in images displayed on a smartphone. The team won the Ig Nobel Prize for nutrition in September 2023.
https://www.youtube.com/user/digitalcontentslab

Takashi Ikegami Laboratory, The University of Tokyo

Supported by Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratory, University of Osaka

Alter3 Exhibition Period: 2023.Oct.7 (Sat.) - Nov.24 (Fri.)
*The exhibition will be closed from Oct.12 (Thu.) to Oct.14 (Sat) due to the Alter3 performance event.

Alter is a humanoid robot that has been under development since 2016, and Alter3 is its third model. It has 43 articulated axes, 7 of which are used for facial muscles, 2 for eye movements, and 18 for the left arm. Each of these axes of rotation can take a value between 0 and 255 and is moved by compressed air. By programming the control of the 43 axes, a variety of expressive movements can be generated.
In this exhibition, a giant language model, GPT4, experimentally extends the expression of Alter3. GPT4 learns the amount of natural language (the language used in our everyday lives), allowing Alter3 to transcend human imitation and interact with humans in an empathet ic way. In this experiment , six GPT4-simulated personalities (philosopher, scientist, novelist, artist, musician, and 10-year-old child) are given to Alter3 and they speak freely internally. In addition, the GPT4 programs gestures based on the conversations, which allow Alter3 to move its own body autonomously. Alter3 is updated daily and learns new movements as it communicates with humans.
Please talk to Alter3 and take part in the experiment: what kind of conversations will Alter3's personality have, and what movements will it learn? These experiments will allow us to think about what is different and what is the same between humans and humanoid AI.
https://www.sacral.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/

Shruti Belliappa & Kiraṇ Kumār

Shruti Belliappa is a UK-based writer and postwar and contemporary art historian born in India. Her doctoral research focuses on counter cartographies, technologies of belonging and spatial justice in the borderlands of the Mekong. Kiraṇ Kumar, born in India, is an artist, researcher and writer presently living between India & Germany. His practice lies at the intersection of dance, critical historiography and speculative computing.
The Department of Para Pedagogic Practices is the first collaboration between Belliappa and Kumar. This eight-part installation/publication series critically considers historical and contemporary exchanges in the Indian Ocean region. This second installation of the series conceives a polylogue between AI and three paradigmatic sites of world art histories founded on the conceptual void (Sunyata): premodern Tantrik paintings, the origins of conceptual art in the Western canon, and the Japanese avant-garde in the 1960s. In a realm of epistemic reflexivity in decolonial practices, this work seeks to create a radical transnational Ground Zero or Sunya in the new epoch of Artificial Intelligence and visual epistemologies.
What does art for a hyper-frenetic image-ridden world look like, as AI takes its place in the world, superseding human modes of production?
https://archipelagoarchives.com/Kira-Kumar

Refik Anadol

Refik Anadol is a Turkish-born artist currently based in the US. His work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. Taking the data that surrounds us as primary material, and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol offers us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expands the possibilities of interdisciplinary arts.
This exhibition features a series of works that convert electroencephalogram (EEG) data of human brain waves into visual arts, such as “living paintings” and sculptures, by utilizing unique algorithms developed by the artist. Neural Painting is a “living painting,” in which the EEG data of humans in states of excitement and focus inform the shapes and animation speed. From A to C represent the meditative, negative, and positive states of brain waves, respectively. Melting Memories Sculptures is a series of sculptures, generated from the EEG data recorded when a human focuses on specific long-term memories. The human-AI collaboration makes it possible to visualize and intuitively experience emotional waves that would otherwise be invisible.
https://refikanadol.com/

AFROSCOPE

AFROSCOPE (aka Isaac Nana Opoku) is an artist and designer, as well as a social entrepreneur. He explores themes including decolonization and deep adaptation (adaptation to the collapse of Western industrialized lifestyles) by using both digital technologies and traditional analog mediums. AFROSCOPE has represented Ghana at the Venice Biennale in 2022, and presented his works in several other exhibitions.
This exhibition introduces his digital art (available as NFT art) for the first time in Japan. All of his works have undertones of Afrofuturism—a movement that combines black culture with futuristic representations such as technology and science fiction. Afrofuturism questions and aims to deconstruct the existing Western-centric cultural representations. AFROSCOPE sees his activities as stimuli for “decolonization of the imagination.” Making ism in faraway Africa accessible from Japan, as well as making it readily available as an NFT art form are perhaps some of the notable benefits of DX.
https://afroscope.com/

Shoei Matsuda

Shoei Matsuda is a conceptual artist emblematic of the social networking era. He started his creative activities on social media in 2010. His artistic practice, which involves direct interventions into cities and society while collaborating with the public, was met with high acclaim, and he was conferred with a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in 2016. More recently, the artist is known for his giant pictogram balloon
work, The Big Flat Now, and Lunatic Pandora, a vending machine where NFTs can be purchased.
This work, the Souvenir, features a vending machine from which anyone can readily purchase badges resembling verified badges on social media. Those who purchased the badges are then given an opportunity to wear them. With a touch of humor, the work interprets the body as an irreplaceable social media account to pose a question: what can sustain the authenticity and rights of the body in a digital society? There is also a 1/100 chance of drawing a special badge embossed with Kanazawa’s gold leaf.
https://www.shoeimatsuda.com/

David OReilly

David OReilly is a media artist based in the US, who has worked across the fields of design, animation, and interactive art. His animated short films have been highly acclaimed online and at film festivals. For the film, Her, he collaborated with Spike Jonze and created the 3D holographic video games. He is also known as a creator of simulation games such as Mountain and Everything.
Eye of the Dream is a simulation of the Big Bang—the birth of the universe—reorganized into four worlds: universe, fire, water, and spirit, using a number of 3D objects representing the universe that featured in his earlier work, Everything. The exhibited work is based on his 2018 work, reconstructed as a sound-reactive interactive video. Because it is a simulation that changes its images by reacting to the sound that visitors produce, the video that is being displayed now is transient and unique. This work digitally depicts the birth of the universe, which is also connected to the origin of life, and challenges those living in today’s digital world to reinterpret the word “live.”
https://www.davidoreilly.com/
Presented in cooperation with: Alexis André (Sony Computer Science Laboratories)

Jonathan Zawada

Jonathan Zawada is an Australia-based artist, who has consistently worked under the theme of senses derived from digital experiences. His works are informed by his early roots in web design and programming, and cover a wide variety of fields including furniture design, sculpture, video, and painting.
Sacrifice, An Act of Permanence is a multimedia installation involving paintings, sculptures, and a computer system mediated via various software and peripheral devices. The three paintings of rock strata are based on three different pieces of human chromosome information related to memory and reminiscence. A webcam captures them while a computer that is suspended in midair converts them into descriptive texts in natural language via machine learning, which are read out as audio data at the venue. The information is then converted in the devices of the system and passed on to the next. From visual to verbal, and to audio: information is endlessly encoded from one form to another following a detour process, while taking in errors and losses of data along the way. Processing the data causes the computer to emit surplus heat and melts the tortoise-shaped wax, newly generating a stratum in the center of the installation.
This work suggests that transmission of information is the core of every single phenomenon of any scale―planets, humans, and elementary particles―and reexamines the boundary of digital technology and human nature.
https://lnk.bio/zawhatthe
In cooperation with: Nozza Service

Sputniko!

Artist. Associate Professor of Design, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. While at the Royal College of Art (RCA), she began creating video installations that reflect the changing human condition and society as they are affected by technology. In this exhibition, she depicts the irony of the four-leaf clover, which was once difficult to locate visually, but can now be easily found due to technological development, in a new video work.
https://sputniko.com/

Emi Kusano

Emi Kusano is a retro-futuristic artist from Tokyo. She has exhibited worldwide at Christie’s New York and Unit London. She made her debut as a street photographer in Harajuku when she was in high school, and later became the leader and lead singer of the band Satellite Young, focusing on music and installation art. In 2021, she joined the Web3 movement with her then 8-year-old son’s Zombie Zoo project. In 2022, she co-founded the independent animation studio Shinsei Galverse, and the NFT art she sold after its launch ranked first in the world in terms of transaction value on OpenSea. This time, she will present an installation composed of images created by image-generating AI, exploring the relationship between AI and human memory.
https://www.emiksn.com/

Merve Akdogan

Merve Akdogan, an architect and artist, merges architecture, multimedia, and art, whose interests include queer theory and wearable technologies. Merve, also a tattoo artist, now focuses on generative media and AI while developing innovative wearable objects that shape social, cultural, and political environments.
Akdogan’s major theme has been regenerative responses to societal and cultural variations, and this work, Ghost Stories, is no exception. This video work, compiling photos of abandoned architectural structures that were collected through open call, was presented at the Turkish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2023. Using generative AI, the work visualizes a possible future with the regenerated and restored structures. Various social constraints and biases often hamper the regeneration of buildings, but with AI, visual images can be instantly produced with a single leap. In addition to demonstrating the importance of visual communication in persuading people about hard-to-alter architecture, this work attempts to propose a more hopeful future beyond preconceptions, as well as new possibilities that are made accessible by AI.
https://architecture.mit.edu/people/merve-akdogan

David Blandy

David Brandy is an artist with an anthropological approach based on his interest in history and archaeology. His work is sometimes examined through practical activities in virtual spaces that he includes in his videos and performances. How to Fly (2020), presented at this exhibition, begins with a tutorial video that simulates the flight of a seabird through a game tool. Through this simulation, the video work examines the relationship between nature and living creatures.
https://davidbrandy.com/

DXP Exhibition Original Candy

5 patterns available for sale. These candy bars (cider flavor) are printed with a portion of the work of the artists showing at the exhibition. These goods are a reproduction of one of the key themes of the exhibition, “eating the digital.”
Price: ¥756

DXP Original Socks

Socks with the exhibition’s main visual arranged and printed on them. 7 colors available. Available in one size for both men and women, the socks are sold individually, not as a pair, and buyers can choose any combination of colors for both pairs. Of course, they can also be purchased in odd numbers like 3 or 5.
Price: ¥825 per sock (¥1,650 per pair)