[spectre] Condolences for Seiko Mikami (1961-2015)

[yukiko shikata]

 Condolences for Seiko Mikami (1961-2015)

Always energetic, charming, engaging and charismatic -- a chiasma of
various people -- Seiko Mikami was one and only artist who realized works
derived from her unique vision of the world. She passed away so suddenly.
Since then I feel very lost, thinking over her. I met Mikami at her first
exhibition “New Formation of Decline (Horobino Shin-zokei)” in 1985, held
at the ruined space of a former Yebisu Beer Factory Laboratory*, Ebisu,
Tokyo. For about 30 years, thereafter, she had been a stimulating artist
and encouraging friend to me. As a writer, curator and a colleague of Tama
Art University,** I shared her students, and witnessed her activities as an
International artist and caring professor.

In a series of huge installations in Tokyo in the 1980s, she developed her
subjects based on the concept regarding city as metaphor, from bone-like
physical structures (the exhibition at Yebisu) to nerve systems*** and
further to the immune system, and finally the “Information war” in society
and body.**** Each exhibition was held in an unique space and location she
had found to fit her direction, where the whole space was encroached by
huge amounts of junk sculptures forming a heteromorphic dystopia, that made
us experience the transforming body in information society tactually. She
was then coming into sudden prominence, in the booming Tokyo of the 1980s
cyberpunk, techno culture scene — it was far distant from the ordinary art
scene with museums and galleries. As a self-made artist, her work always
expanded the notion of art throughout independent activities and
process-based interaction.

During the period she lived in NY (1991-2000), when she studied Computer
Science at New York Institute of Technology and worked at Bell
Laboratories, she focused on invisible, immaterial and microscopic aspects
of the world, with flow-based perspective. Her interest shifted to
Bio-informatics and the notion of “membrane”. Since the mid-90s, by coining
the concept “Perceptual Interface”, she started to realize interactive
works to alienate the body by media technologies such as “Molecular
Informatics – morphogenic substance via eye tracking”(1996)*****, “World,
Membrane and the Dismembered Body”(1997).******

In 00s, after she returned to Japan and started to teach at Tama Art
University, “Perceptual Interface” was further extended to “gravity”,
focusing on the very meta-existence not only forming the world on Earth
(all the nature, creatures and artificial entities are based on it,
including our body and perception), but also in the universe; wherein
“gravicells – gravity and resistance” (2004-10) was collaborated with
architect Sota Ichikawa (dNA) at Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media[YCAM].
In her last huge interactive installation “Desire of Codes”(2010),
co-produced with YCAM, her standpoint expanded into omnipresent,
multi-layered status of data-base “body and perception” in the era of
surveillance, tracking, analysis and feedback loops through networks where
“desire” are triggered and accelerated by algorithms. The installation was
minimal, systematic, and uncanny, consisting of three parts: (1) arthropod
antennae with sensors and cameras forming grid-structure on a big white
wall to sense and track visitors with eerie machine noises; (2) 6 robotic
arms with a camera and projector hung from ceiling to track visitors; and
(3) multi-eye-like projection composed of many small images of visitors,
people in the street from many places in the world via Webcams, appearing
from data-base by original programs.

Though the material and the way of expression have changed, Mikami’s
direction was consistent throughout her career. Her interest was to
deconstruct, dismember the illusion of “unified self/body” by inviting
visitors to experience physical and perceptual environment. She had a
unique perspective of somehow “beyond and bellow human being,” including
smaller creatures such as insects or even particles or molecules -- all
those are autonomous, bottom-up, and in a flowing process of emergence.

Mikami was a critical, reflexive and at the same time, remarkably crucial,
intuitive “creature”. She sensitively kept on capturing a possible relation
between information society and the body. The impact of “3. 11” (the big
East Japan Earthquake and followed severe nuclear accident of Fukushima
Dai-ichi” in 2011) in Japan let her take a few years off to contemplate and
comprehend; her coming work would have to be the one integrating the issues
in her way, perhaps with particle- or dust-like super small drones in the
air,****** but now is stranded forever in time.


Yukiko Shikata
February 26, 2015 Tokyo


[Notes]
*Currently Yebisu Garden Place
**She was professor of Media Art course of Information Design Department,
Tama Art University and I worked with her as a guest professor
***”Bad Art for Bad People”, BF of Iikura Atlantic Building, Tokyo, 1986
****“Information Weapon Super Clean Room”, Toyoko Chikyu Kankyo Kenkyujo
(literally translated as “Toyoko Institute of Global Environment”), 1990.
*****Canon ARTLAB6, co-curated by Kazunao Abe, Yukiko Shikata
******NTT InterCommunication Center[ICC]
*******She devoted her energy for the new work, by commuting Switzerland
frequently last year
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