<div dir="ltr">sl, thank you... yukiko</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">2015-03-04 12:48 GMT+09:00 shu lea cheang <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:shulea@earthlink.net" target="_blank">shulea@earthlink.net</a>></span>:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Dear Yukiko<br>
<br>
Much memory with Seiko, thanks for posting this write up. My grief is with you.<br>
<br>
sl<span class=""><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
At 10:40 AM +0900 3/3/15, yukiko shikata wrote:<br>
</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class="">
Condolences for Seiko Mikami (1961-2015)<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br></span>
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.<br>
<br>
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).******<br>
<br>
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.<span class=""><br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<br>
Yukiko Shikata<br>
February 26, 2015 Tokyo<br>
<br>
<br>
[Notes]<br>
*Currently Yebisu Garden Place<br>
**She was professor of Media Art course of Information Design Department, Tama Art University and I worked with her as a guest professor<br>
***"Bad Art for Bad People", BF of Iikura Atlantic Building, Tokyo, 1986<br>
****"Information Weapon Super Clean Room", Toyoko Chikyu Kankyo Kenkyujo (literally translated as "Toyoko Institute of Global Environment"), 1990.<br>
*****Canon ARTLAB6, co-curated by Kazunao Abe, Yukiko Shikata<br>
******NTT InterCommunication Center[ICC]<br>
*******She devoted her energy for the new work, by commuting Switzerland frequently last year<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br></span>
______________________________<u></u>________________<br>
SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe<br>
Info, archive and help:<br>
<a href="https://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre" target="_blank">https://post.in-mind.de/cgi-<u></u>bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre</a><br>
</blockquote>
<br>
</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr">Director<div>AMIT (Art, Media and I, Tokyo) 2015<div>March 19-22, 2015</div></div><div>@Marunouchi Area (Marucube, OAZO, Tokyo International Forum, Naka-dori, etc.)</div><div><a href="http://amit.jp/" target="_blank">http://amit.jp/</a></div></div></div>
</div>