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

[yukiko shikata]

sl, thank you... yukiko

2015-03-04 12:48 GMT+09:00 shu lea cheang <shulea at earthlink.net>:

> Dear Yukiko
>
> Much memory with Seiko, thanks for posting this write up. My grief is with
> you.
>
> sl
>
>
>
> At 10:40 AM +0900 3/3/15, yukiko shikata wrote:
>
>> 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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>
>


-- 
Director
AMIT (Art, Media and I, Tokyo) 2015
March 19-22, 2015
@Marunouchi Area (Marucube, OAZO, Tokyo International
Forum, Naka-dori, etc.)
http://amit.jp/
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