[spectre] Remembering the artist Seiko Mikami (1961-2015)

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Remembering the artist Seiko Mikami (1961-2015)

The news about Seiko Mikami's death comes as a shock. We lose a friend, 
and we lose one of the most important artists exploring the conditions 
of being human in a technological world. In Mikami-san's case, *this 
media and technology-related work extends over more than two decades* 
during which she realised a series of works that are as few in numbers 
as they are complex in their conception. These works deal with the 
encounter between humans and technical systems, and with the 
possibilities of self-reflection offered by technical interfaces. 
Perception and sensation are the guiding topics of these works: what 
does it mean to hear, to see, to feel? Seiko Mikami constructed 
installations in which it was possible to see oneself seeing, to hear 
oneself hearing, and to get a sense of the extended tactile space in 
which we move around today. And, in her most recent work, Mikami-san 
offered us a speculation about the sensations of a machine system that 
observes us as we are looking at it in the gallery space.

She inherited this reflexivity from a tradition of 20th century art that 
includes Naum Gabo presenting the virtual sculptural shape of a spinning 
metal rod, Marcel Duchamp exploring the act of viewing by spinning disks 
and spheres, and Nam June Paik, who she had met in the 1980s, and who 
was a master of appropriating and reinventing media technologies. Unlike 
these artists, Seiko Mikami was not concerned about the conceptual 
status of art, or about its autonomy. For her, art was the realm of 
creativity that allowed her and others to ask questions and explore 
aspects of human existence that do not fit into the formulas of 
functionality, productivity and innovation. This might be the paradox of 
Mikami's work: that as much as she used and developed, together with her 
collaborators, new technological systems and advanced solutions, her 
interest was never in the technology, but only in its potential to 
elicit, mediate and reflect human experience.

People who met and worked with Seiko Mikami will remember a fine, always 
courteous and friendly person who was as generous in sharing her ideas 
and insights, as she was diligent when it came to the details that were 
important to her. Her years as a young artist in New York City gave her 
an independent habit and mind that was unusual for a Japanese woman of 
her generation, and that has been inspirational for many students and 
younger artists that she later worked with at Tama Art University in 
Tokyo. Nowhere else her presence and inspiration will be missed more 
urgently.

Early experiences with complex technical systems taught Seiko Mikami, 
over the years, how to combine the most advanced technical development 
work that she enjoyed especially at the Canon ARTLAB and at Yamaguchi 
Center for Art and Media, with a pragmatism that made her installations 
affordable to build, easy to ship, and easy to set up. Part of her 
success in the last decade, and a sign of her great creativity, has been 
the fact that her installations, incl. the impressively complex 
"Gravicells" (co-authored with Sota Ichikawa) and "Desire of Codes", 
would fit into a few crates and could readily be adapted to the 
available exhibition spaces, without losing any of their aesthetic power 
and finesse. -

The robotic camera system of the "Desire of Codes" installation observes 
the visitors and processes their video images into the multi-facetted 
projection of a virtual machine eye. *The data-base stores all of the 
portraits* and mixes these images with live feeds from webcams all over 
the world. But when the system detects no movements in the space, 
apparently alone and without human observers, it falls into an enigmatic 
dream state in which a darker tone of images and a rumbling drone of 
sounds create a somber and melancholic atmosphere that might be an 
autobiographic foresight, but it might also be a vision that Seiko 
Mikami left us with, namely that the technological systems not only 
expand our *intelligence*, but that they also inherit our sentiments. 
Mikami-san gave us opportunities to reflect both on the nature of 
technology, and on the nature of humans at the beginning of the 21st 
century. That reflection will have to continue without her now.


Andreas Broeckmann

Berlin, 27 January 2015