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ART in the Age of Hyper Tecnorogical Reproductions 2023 3 24 - 5 21 11:00 - 20:00

超複製技術時代の芸術

分有、アウラ、超国家的権力

NFTはアートの何を変えるのか？

Redefining "Ownership"—Shared, Common, Partial

Based on technology that secures the value of digital data and enhances its authenticity, an NFT (non-fungible token) can be described as a certificate of authenticity that makes it difficult to tamper with data. With the advent of blockchain technology, which serves as the foundation for NFTs, suddenly the innumerable images, music, and videos that exist on the internet and can be reproduced infinitely as semi-public goods have gained the potential to be owned as private property with unique scarcity value that changes hands at lofty prices.Countless NFT works of art—including avatars in virtual spaces, social media profiles, animations, and games—which were expected to have some kind of practical use in the future popped up, driving people to engage in speculation. But artists have been scrutinizing the essence of NFTs and inventing ways to strip them of their utility, subverting their functionality, and extending their conventional significance.This section focuses on the artists who are exploring sui generis expression by inserting themselves into the new forms of “ownership” that have been brought about by NFTs. Through the works of artists such as Rhea Myers (who has granted ownership to anyone in order to put a work into the public commons) and TeamLab, as well as Damien Hirst (who has created phygital works—pairs of digital and physical works—that were partly owned: the owner could only keep half of the pair, the other half being destroyed) and Tetsutaro Kamatani, this section shows unique forms of expression only made possible by NFTs, and their historic value.

DAMIAN
HIRST

8348. She called me with a set,
from The Currency

In 2021 Hirst issued 10,000 NFTs that were digital versions of paintings of dots, which he sold for $2,000 each (about 20,000 yen) via a lottery system. One year after their purchase, owners had to choose whether to keep the NFT or exchange it for the real painting. Because the painting would be burned if an owner chose the NFT, and the NFT would be deleted if they chose the painting, the owners were being subversively asked whether the value of the work was in the material item or in the data. Ultimately, 5,149 people chose the painting, leaving 4,851 NFTs. After the deadline for responding, Hirst—clad in a fireproof outfit—burned the 4,851 paintings that were not chosen in an incinerator set up on the wall of a London art gallery. The burned paintings were worth more than one billion yen at the initial sale price.In 1970 John Baldessari burned all the paintings that he had created during a 13-year period, and in 1994 Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty staged a performance in which they burned the equivalent of 150 million yen in cash. In light of this history, Hirst’s work can be interpreted as making an ironic statement about the capitalist nature of contemporary art.

RHEA
MYERS

Certificate of
Inauthenticity

ERC-721 tokens Until recently, Rhea Meyers was senior researcher at Dapper Labs, a cutting-edge company that has raised more than 80 billion yen in funding to propel Web3. She has been exploring the inherent aesthetics of blockchain technology since 2013, and she is known worldwide as a pioneer of NFT art.Among masterpieces in art history, Myers focused her attention on works that have repurposed ready-made products (such as Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog), and she created 3D data from these works. Then, she released this free of charge so that anyone can download and create 3D prints. Mimicking a certificate of authenticity, she created a certificate of inauthenticity of the work, selling the certificate as an NFT, and thereby creating a situation where the authenticity of the work changes depending on the presence or absence of an NFT despite ownership of the same Balloon Dog.This work denies the authenticity of reproduced art as well as the right to privately own digital information. It tries to get at the source of the alchemical phenomenon in which cheap mass-produced ready-made goods become the works of a specific artist, with scarcity value that sees them traded at lofty prices.

TETSUTARO
KAMATANI

The Dream of
a Butterfly

The work comprises a painting with 50,000 flies trapped in resin, and an NFT that keeps perpetually changing whenever the owner changes.A skull ornately decorated with an overabundance of flora and fauna is drawn atop countless dead flies. This can be interpreted as a derivation of the vanitas genre of painting in Western art (still life paintings that express the impermanence of wealth and fame), in which paintings serve to remind us that even a life of splendor will eventually crumble to dust. This meaning is further reinforced by the fact that the piece is framed with a model of Byodoin Temple, which was destroyed in the fires of war. The title of the piece is taken from The Butterfly Dream, a tale from the ancient Chinese thinker Zhuangzi which asks whether dreams are real or if reality is a dream. The perpetual existence of the paired NFT in the virtual space also emphasizes the fragility of reality.The NFT incorporates an algorithm that changes the image in the piece whenever the owner changes, making it impossible for possession of a certain image to continue eternally. While it belongs to the lineage of conceptual art that rejects the superficial ownership of art, it can also be understood as a message that no one can own true art.

TEAMLAB

Matter is Void -
Black in White

NFTs are a technology that grants private ownership of data, but in this project anyone, whether or not they own the NFT, can download the artwork for free and own it. However, only the owners of all the seven NFTs in the Matter is Void series are free to modify the words contained in the artwork. When someone modifies the words, the change is synchronously reflected in the works that are owned by others. and even if they write the same words, the work will never display the original state again. The boundary between ownership and authorship is dismantled, and the appearance and value of the work changes through a co-creation process that involves many people. As suggested by the title, Matter is Void, this work is an expression of the Japanese-Buddhist expression shikisoku zekuu, a meditation on impermanence and emptiness. The authenticity of a piece is not determined by the NFT, and in that all of the pieces are genuine, like Rhea Myers, TeamLab explores the off-chain, anti-capitalist “commons” aesthetic.

SETH
SIGELAUB

The Artist’s Reserved Rights
Transfer And Sale Agreement

Inspired by conversations with many art professionals, in 1971 curator Seth Siegelaub, known as the “father of conceptual art,” drew up this contract along with attorney Robert Projansky. It is legal document designed to protect the social and economic interests of artists when reselling, duplicating, renting, or otherwise transferring works in any medium, including digital art. It was published in five languages, including English, French, and German, and distributed free of charge as a folded poster.It was created as a means of correcting the pervasive inequities of the art world, particularly the artist’s inability to be involved in the control of their work after it is transferred to a buyer, and also the fact that the artist does not receive a penny even if the work generates enormous economic benefits on the secondary market. It sets out royalties for the artist and the collector's rights and responsibilities, among other terms.It is displayed in this exhibition to document the theory of a mechanism for protecting the rights to non-material works through NFTs before they even existed, and it is a historical starting point for re-evaluating what can be freely used and modified by anyone as open source.

The Aura of Digital Works

In his 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, leading twentieth century philosopher Walter Benjamin described the authenticity that is inherent solely to a particular work of art that is basis of copies as its “aura.” He also predicted a future in which the "aura" of works of art would disappear due to reproduction technology.However, contrary to Benjamin’s expectations, throughout the twentieth century reproduction has instead served as a device for amplifying “aura,” as evidenced by the sale of an Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe painting for 20 billion yen in 2022. The situation that NFTs are now actually causing—one in which the distinction between copies and the original is unclear, but in which data detached from location and space trades at high prices as if it has unique value—calls for a update on the problems raised by Benjamin.Therefore, this section focuses on four artists who have explored the relationship between technology and art and considers “digital aura.” Through the works of Mariko Mori (who investigates the origins of existence by going back to the ancient Greek word for "soul" that is the origin of the word "aura") and Lu Yang, as well as Rafaël Rozendaal (who treats the algorithm as the main body of the work, rather than the physical object) and his apparent forerunner Sol LeWitt, this section critiques superficial and materialist values and once again asks where the essential value of art lies.

MARIKO
MORI

Eternal
Mass

Eternal Mass, a 3D sculpture that resembles a pair of living organisms floating in whitespace, is inspired by superstring theory, which explains everything in the world from the starting point of vibrating one-dimensional tiny strings. In superstring theory, which describes the world in ten dimensions, in addition to the four dimensions of space and time, there are six more dimensions that humans cannot perceive. The artist superimposes this phenomenon in which the "six unseen dimensions" always exist as a pair (the mirror symmetry of the Calabi-Yau Manifold) on the ancient Japanese myth of a pair of gods—male and female—who created heaven and earth. This work, which ties the ultra-modern theory of particles described by science to the belief in reincarnation and the soul, can be interpreted as an expression of the principles that form the basis of life and matter.The pearl-like spheres that make up Eternal Mass are distributed one by one to the NFT owners, and the owners can form pairs among themselves to bring forth new spheres. The NFT economic transactions are transformed into metaphors for connecting lives and nurturing new life.

SOL
LEWITT

Arcs,Circles,&Grids

In the early 1970s, Sol LeWitt began adding arcs and circles to his pencil drawings of straight parallel lines. Arcs, Circles & Grids, which he created for the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland in 1972, contains pen and ink drawings depicting all possible combinations of the three elements in the title, and this is one edition of this work. In this work, the combinations were generated based on certain rules, taking into account the line type (arc, circle, or grid) and all the points on the page (the four corners and the four midpoints of the sides). In addition to the fact that countless patterns are created by overlapping arcs and circles, it is also regarded as pioneer of modern algorithmic painting and a precursor of NFT art because its simple motifs are repeated, it can be simultaneously exhibited anywhere by anyone with the instructions, and it can be reproduced at any scale, from the size of a sheet of paper to a wall.

RAFAEL
ROZENDAAL

Cabinet 41

Since the late 1990s, Rafaël Rozendaal has been creating compositions that transform on the screen through code, and he has published a number of compositions on the internet that have no beginning or end. Rozendaal assigns a unique domain name to each of his works, which are created using algorithms. Because of this style, he is known around the world as a standard bearer of the post-internet movement.This work is part of a fully on-chain NFT series released in 2022 in which the composition on the screen is automatically generated by an algorithm. In this exhibition, a mural enlarged to a height of 3 meters in physical space and digital images projected on a monitor are displayed as a pair. A methodology specific to digital, which allows images to be adapted to multiple different scales at the same time, is applied here to a real space. In this exhibition, Rozendaal’s painting as algorithm is juxtaposed with works by Sol LeWitt, who is known as a pioneer of conceptual art, showing that the medium of NFTs is the i

LUYANG

The Great Adventure of
Matertal World - Game Film

A game that transects science, art, and religion, The Great Adventure of Material World challenges human perceptions of the physical and cognitive worlds, allowing viewers to experience a state akin to Buddhist enlightenment. This work is a tale in which viewers are led by a knight of the “Material World” virtual space to travel through many different worlds as their identity transforms over and over again. In eight episodes they explore the universe, acquire energy, are destroyed and reborn, and experience internal battles with emotions and desires. Accompanied by dramatic music, as the story unfolds the asexual knight observes and philosophically ponders the male and female, life and death, happiness and suffering, desire, eternity and reincarnation.The piece says, "In order to end the suffering of this world, we must sever the attachment to oneself that is its cause, and destroy false belief in the material world that is like a dream.” While thoroughly dismantling the religious worldview from an ultra-modern perspective based on a scientific historical view, this work paradoxically connects to premodern universal thinking such as Asian mythology and Buddhist enlightenment.

The New Public Commons: The DAO as a Supranational Power and Social Movement

The characteristics of NFTs can be condensed into three areas: transparency, permanence, and autonomy. NFTs circulate through the community as a sort of money, and they also function as a digital key to online spaces where owners can interact with each other. Moreover, because NFTs clearly define and automatically execute rights and obligations programmatically, they are more trustworthy than humans in terms of fairness, allowing benefits to be redistributed appropriately. Therefore, NFTs are sometimes traded as something with value beyond ownership rights to build creative, decentralized autonomous communities (DAOs) with high levels of contribution.NFT owners take pride in belonging to a community and play a role as co-creators or curators of works, and therefore, in terms of contemporary art history, NFTs can be seen as an extension of “relational aesthetics,” which encourages viewers to participate in the work.Benjamin predicted that art based on reproduction technology would break down authoritarian traditions and history and promote democratization against fascism, and this section focuses on this sort of new public commons that dwells within NFTs. Taihei Shii and Masaki Fujihata are trying to democratize art through NFTs; Shunsuke Takawo makes donations toward developing a creative online culture; and UkraineDAO uses NFTs as a medium to generate power to oppose international wars and even state power. All of them are realizing Benjamin's dream world.

SYUNSUKE
TAKAO

3D Print Generativemasks
Generativemasks

This project was announced in 2021 by Shunsuke Takawo, who continues his practice of writing short pieces of code every day as he promotes "dailycoding," an activity that connects programming to daily life and the surrounding environment. The project uses p5.js, a type of JavaScript programming language, and every time it is reloaded it automatically generates masks with a wide variety of facial expressions inspired by patterns of various ethnic cultures. All 10,000 pieces were sold out within two hours of the release for about 300 million yen, and the entire profit was donated to an organization related to generative art. For this exhibition, not only were the works printed in 3D with the help of DMM.make, a different NFC chip has been embedded in each mask so that visitors can use their smartphones to find information about the work and its owner. In terms of diversifying the activities of various artists and creating a sustainable system, this work goes beyond the production of a single artist to create a new commons that uses NFTs to democratize art.

TAIHEI
SHII

IT II

At a glance the work looks like a bookshelf, but it is actually the spines sliced from books and spread across a canvas. It is impossible to read what is inside, and this only emphasizes that each book is a door to a world of imagination. If one thinks of a bookshelf as a "database,” then this work can be interpreted as an "information painting” that is a representation of an internet that connects to different worlds with search terms, without the use of technology.At the same time that he was creating this work, the artist conceived the idea of using technology to build infrastructure for the art world, and after more than ten years he launched Startbahn, a company that uses blockchain technology including NFTs to transform the art world. In the video next to the painting, the artist engages in a conversation with the Chat GPT artificial-intelligence chatbot to discuss the process of starting a business. This attempt to connect art platforms around the world, using NFTs create a system that allows even unknown artists to become self-supporting, foreshadows the emergence of art rooted in a "new public commons" that breaks down traditional hierarchies.

MASAKI
FUJIHATA

Brave New Commons

In 2021, the artist sold image data created in the 1980s on an old Macintosh as 30 NFT artworks. However, unlike a normal auction, in which the price climbs as more people want the piece, in this case, more buyers for a work meant that the final price was pushed down to close to zero yen. In other words, unlike normal price-setting, this was an attempt to have buyers assign a price to the work democratically. This project invites people to participate in an experimental online community through NFTs, and it can be said to be an attempt to create values that run counter to capitalism and a new public commons that cannot be owned. The title is an homage to the 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, in which technology deprives humans of their dignity, raising the question of whether this technology will lead to a utopia or a dystopia.

UKURAINE
DAO

Ukurainian Flag

After the Russian aggression in Ukraine, Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founding member of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, along with a number of NGOs, launched Ukraine DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, which sold a Ukrainian flag NFT. The NFT was auctioned using collective bidding, and it was ultimately sold for about 800 million yen to 3,271 bidders. All proceeds were donated to the Ukrainian non-profit Come Back Alive to help citizens wounded and put in peril by the war. However, the entity that facilitated the funding blocked further donations after claims that funds were used in a manner that contravened the entity’s terms and conditions.Food, energy, and military supplies were actually purchased with the donated crypto assets, so this NFT has become a symbol of "the world’s first crypto war." At the same time, a decentralized supranational solidarity was born online, one that at times has had more power than the state and that has changed the society in the real world. This hints at a future where art, through the medium of NFTs, will transform society.

Artist / Curator

Artist

Damien HirstArtist Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, UK, and lives in Devon and London. With the support of the world-renowned collector Charles Saatchi, in 1988, while studying at Goldsmiths College, he took the British contemporary art world by storm and became a central figure in the YBA phenomenon that made its presence felt worldwide. In 1995 Hirst was awarded the Turner Prize. In 2017, timed to coincide with the Venice Biennale, he invested the equivalent of 7 billion yen of his own money to mount a solo exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, owned by French billionaire Francois Pinault. Generating the equivalent of more than 33 billion yen in sales, the show became a hot topic. Recent solo exhibitions include Cherry Blossoms (Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris, 2021 and The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2022); and Damien Hirst (Tate Modern (London), 2012).

Taihei ShiiAn artist and entrepreneur, in 2014 Shii founded Startbahn, Inc. while a graduate student at the University of Tokyo to provide infrastructure to assure the reliability and authenticity of works of art. The company's core business, Startrail, received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation in recognition of the public nature of its function. Shii currently serves as a director of the Eastern Culture Foundation and director of the Open Art Consortium. He has also been a guest lecturer at the Tokyo University of the Arts and a member of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) Study Group on Art and the Economy and Society. As an artist, in addition to showing works at solo and group exhibitions, he has organized exhibitions such as Fujisanten (2017-2020), Sizeless Twin (2022), and Moon Art Night Shimokitazawa (2022). His major publications include A New Form of Art: What Does NFT Art Change? (Heibonsha Shinsho).

Lu YangYang is an artist who was born in Shanghai and works in Shanghai and Tokyo. She works across disciplines, fusing religion, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and modern technology to create images that are fantastical, but often painful and shocking. Her artistic practice spans a wide range of fields, including game engines, 3D animation, video game installations, holograms, and motion capture performances. She has had solo exhibitions at Kunstpalais Erlangen (Erlangen, Germany, 2022), Spiral Garden (Tokyo, 2018), and M Woods (Beijing, 2017-2018). Recent large thematic exhibitions include the Asia Society Triennial (New York, 2021) and the 59th Venice Biennale (2022). She was also selected for the BMW Art Journey (2019) and as Deutsche Bank's Artist of the Year 2022.

Mariko MoriMori is an artist who was born in Tokyo in 1967. Major awards that she has received include the Menzione d'Onore at the Venice Biennale (1997); the 8th Annual Award as a Promising Artist and Scholar in the Field of Contemporary Japanese Art, given by the Japan Cultural Arts Foundation (2001); and Honorary Fellow, University of the Arts, London (2014). Major solo exhibitions include Pure Land (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2002) and Oneness (Groninger Museum, Holland; ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark; Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, Ukraine). She has also shown her work at the Royal Academy of Arts (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondazione Prada (Milan), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Brooklyn Museum (New York). Oneness attracted 500,000 visitors, making it the most popular exhibition in the world that year. Her works are in collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum, Centre Pompidou, and the Fukutake Foundation.

Sol LeWittLeWitt was an artist who was born in Connecticut (US) in 1928 and who died in 2007. After graduating from Syracuse University he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Beginning in 1966, he created the Serial Project series, which systematically visualizes the basic structure of a cube. In 1967 he published his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art essay in Art Forum magazine, and in 1969 he published Sentences on Conceptual Art in Art & Language magazine. He declared that the concept is the most important aspect of a work, and that the planning, methods, and execution involved in production is a perfunctory affair. Beginning in around 1968, LeWitt created the Wall Drawings series, in which he entrusted the production of the work to other people based on his instructions for drawing lines of pre-determined lengths in a radial pattern, without him being personally involved. As a pioneer of conceptual art and minimalism, his works have been collected by museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Tate, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Shunsuke TakawoTakawo is a media artist who was born in Kumamoto Prefecture in 1981. He graduated from the University of Tsukuba’s College of Comparative Culture with a degree in contemporary culture in 2004, and he completed a graduate program at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in 2008. In 2021, Takawo launched Generativemasks, the first NFT collection of generative art in Japan, and it was recognized as one of the top NFT projects in Japan on its launch when it generated about 945 ETH (about 300 million yen) of trading value on the secondary market. He has mounted major solo exhibitions including Tiny Sketches (NEORT++, Tokyo, 2022). Recent major group exhibitions include Magical Realism: Part I (Verse, London, 2022); Digital Antiques Exhibition -Thinking About Value and Ownership in the Future (Be at Studio Harajuku, Tokyo, 2022); Crypto Art Week Asia Tokyo (Roppongi DMM Azabu Satellite, Tokyo, 2022); Kasō Yojōhan [virtual 4 1/2 mats] (Wa Matcha Kyoto Gion, Kyoto, 2022); and ART IN METAVERSE (Under Stand Avenue, Seoul, 2022). Major awards include a Special Jury Prize in the Pen Creator Awards 2022 (Juror Daito Manabe).

Rhea MyersMyers is an artist and hacker born in the UK in 1973. Until recently, she was senior smart contract developer at Dapper Labs, one of the leading global companies in the blockchain field. She is currently based in Vancouver, Canada. After graduating from Canterbury College of Art, she studied generative art and 3D printing at Middlesex University’s Centre for Electronic Art. After moving to Vancouver in 2013, she began creating works based on the theme of the culture, theory, and technology of the blockchain. She is known as one of the first artists to adopt blockchain technology as a tool for art, releasing This Contract is Art, which uses an Ethereum smart contract as a medium, in 2014. In 2021, her Secret Artwork (2018), an invisible work protected by cryptographic code, was sold at auction by Sotheby's for the equivalent of about 10 million yen, generating much buzz.

Seth SiegelaubSiegelaub was a curator who was born in New York in 1941 and died in Basel in 2013. Along with Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, and Douglas Huebler, he actively promoted the conceptual art movement, especially from 1968 to 1970. Starting with the Xerox Book, an exhibition held completely on paper, Siegelaub organized ground-breaking projects, symposia, and exhibitions. Afterward, he moved to Paris, where he was involved in establishing the International Mass Media Research Centre (IMMRC). In 2011, he donated a large collection of materials, including early important works of conceptual art that he owned, to Museum of Modern Art (New York). In 2015, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam mounted Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art, an exhibition that looked back on Siegelaub's achievements.

Rafaël RozendaalRozendaal, a leading artist in the world of internet art, was born 1980 in the Netherlands and lives in New York. He releases videos and instructions for playful programs—full of simple forms and movements as well as symbolic colors—over the web, and using these he has developed installations, paintings, and tapestry works for actual exhibition spaces. Recent major exhibitions have been mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Dordrechts Museum (Dordrecht), the Kunsthal (Rotterdam), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and the Armand Hammer Museum of Art (Los Angeles). Rozendaal has a strong relationship with Japan, beginning with his participation in the AIT Residency Program in 2009. He has held five solo exhibitions at Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, beginning in 2010. He has also shown his work at Kenpoku Art (Ibaraki Prefecture, 2016), and in 2018 he mounted his first museum solo exhibition, GENEROSITY at the Towada Art Center (Aomori Prefecture). In April 2023 he will present a solo exhibition at Museum Folkwang (Essen), a top German museum. His books include Home Alone (Three Star Books) and Everything, Always, Everywhere (Valiz).

TeamLabTeamLab has been active since 2001 as an international interdisciplinary art collective that explores the confluence of art, science, technology and the natural world through collective creation. The group includes specialists in a variety of fields, including artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects. TeamLab aims to explore the relationship between the self and the world, and new forms of perception. In order to understand the world, people separate it into independent entities with boundaries between them. The teamLab collective seeks to transcend these boundaries of perception, the boundaries between the self and the world, and the boundaries in the perception of the continuity of time. Everything exists in an immemorial, and fragile yet miraculous, borderless continuity. TeamLab’s works are in collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney); Art Gallery of South Australia, (Adelaide); Asian Art Museum (San Francisco); Asia Society Museum (New York); Borusan Contemporary (Istanbul); National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne); and Amos Rex (Helsinki).

Masaki FujihataFujihata is a media artist who was born in Tokyo in 1956. He is a professor at the Graduate School of Film and New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts and a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Known for their extremely idiosyncratic philosophy and overflowing with humor, his works and projects have won international acclaim. His awards include the Ars Electronica Golden Nica Award (grand prize) for Global Interior Project #2 (1996); the Ministry of Education Art Encouragement Prize for Simultaneous Echoes (2009); the Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for Voices of Aliveness (2013); and the Japanese Medal of Honor with purple ribbon (2016).

Tetsutaro KamataniBorn in Osaka in 1979, Kamatani entered Keio University in 2007 and he is currently based in Tokyo. Kamatani’s works are currently on display in locations around the world, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and New York, and they have attracted attention at international art festivals and solo exhibitions. Through his work overseas, Kamatani developed a deep friendship with art historian and former chairman of Christie’s Europe Archduke Géza of Austria, who supports his activities in New York. Major solo exhibitions include Proliferation (Pellas Gallery, Boston, 2021), Human Paradise-Portrait (Gallery Cellar, Tokyo, 2016), and Human Paradise TOKOYO (Art Stage Singapore, 2011).

Supervising curator

Takayo IidaBorn in Tokyo in 1956, Iida has served as the director of the International Research Center for the Arts at Kyoto University of Art and Design and an instructor for Keio University’s Global Security seminars. After serving as the chief curator at the Aomori Museum of Art and as a board member at Mori Art Museum, he became head of the Sgùrr Dearg Institute for Sociology of the Arts. Iida curated a series of exhibitions on contemporary art (Mark Dion, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Mariko Mori) at the Koishikawa Annex, The University Museum, The University of Tokyo. He has also been the guest curator for exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain (Hiroshi Sugimoto and Tadanori Yokoo). He curated the War and Art I-IV: Terror and Simulacrum of Beauty series at Kyoto University of Art and Design. At the request of Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, Iida curated a series of shows (Yayoi Kusama, Tadanori Yokoo, David Lynch, Daido Moriyama, Tatsuo Miyajima, Takuma Nakahira) at the "Six" art space. He served as the artistic director of the second Dojima River Biennale, ECOSOPHIA. Iida’s major publications include War and Art IV: Terror and Simulacrum of Beauty (Rittorsha, 2016), and Archives of Civilization and Savagery (Shinyosha, 2020). He co-authored Art & Society (by Heizo Takenaka and Fumio Nanjo, Tokyo Shoseki, 2016), Edge of River's Edge - Searching for Kyoko Okazaki (Shinyosha, 2018), and Handbook of Public History in Japan (Yutaka Suga and Katsutaka Hojo, eds., Bensei, 2019).

Curator

Yohsuke TakahashiTakahashi is a curator born in Tokyo in 1985. After serving as a curator at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2014-2021) and then as a curator at the Kadokawa Musashino Museum (2021-2022), Takahashi became an independent curator. His latest exhibition Liminalism, is at the Pellas Gallery (Boston, February-April 2023). The gallery is owned by F Alfredo Pellas IV, a member of the Pellas family, which is based in the US and Nicaragua and operates businesses including resorts, banks, and medical facilities in more than ten countries. His major exhibitions at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa include de-sport: The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Sports through Art (2020); DeathLAB: Democratizing Death (2018-2019, in collaboration with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation); Undying Life (2017-2018); and BCL Ghost in the Cell (2015-2016, toured to Ars Electronica (Austria)). His projects at other museums include Future and the Arts (Mori Art Museum, 2019, co-curator) and Sotaiseiriron at the National Museum of Nature and Science (National Museum of Nature and Science, 2018, art supervisor). Frankenstein in 2018: Bio-art throws light on art, science, and society today, an exhibition mounted in Omotesando in 2018 was selected by a survey of 2 million people as the best exhibition in Tokyo. (TOKYO ARTBEAT)

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Artistic Experiments in the Age of Hyper-Technological Reproduction What will NFTs change about art?

Dates
March 24 to May 21, 2023 (11:00 – 20:00)
Venue
GYRE GALLERY, GYRE 3F, 5-10–1 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
CONTACT
Navi Dial 0570-05-6990 (11:00 – 18:00)
Organizer
GYRE / Sgùrr Dearg Institute for Sociology of the Arts / decontext
Supervising curator
Takayo Iida, Director, Sgùrr Dearg Institute for Sociology of the Arts
Curator
Yohsuke Takahashi (decontext)
Sponsors
JT / Fla-Art
Special cooperation
Startbahn, Inc. / TART K.K.
Cooperation
SCAI THE BATHHOUSE / Takuro Someya Contemporary Art / Sports of Heart Association / SPIRAL / Wacoal Art Center / Gallery Shirakawa
Technical cooperation
DMM.make / 3RD GEAR
Atrium design
COVA (Taketo Kobayashi, Hikaru Takata, Haruka Ohta)
Venue design / Equipment collaboration
Artifact Inc.
Design
Nanami Norita（graphic potato）
PR direction
HiRAO INC
PRESS CONTACT
HiRAO INC | #608 1-11-11 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
T/03.5771.8808｜F/03.5410.8858
Contacts: Seiichiro Mifune, mifune@hirao-inc.com
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