The Coming World 2075_Technology and the Sublime

Thursday, 11/2/2025 - Sunday, 16/3/2025

The Coming World 2075_
Technology and the Sublime

In a city of the future, the rain falls relentlessly. The deluge has gone on for years. It has altered people’s imaginations and desires, and they dream of a boundless arid desert. In the cinema, clips from the movies Solaris and La Jetée play on a loop, set to Bach chorale preludes—serving as a fragmented depiction of the “coming world.” The Coming World gives real urgency to the theme of our relationship with nature, highlighting challenges such as climate change, species extinction, pollution, renewable energy and overpopulation. This allows us to think about nature from a distinctly relational perspective, and in so doing bring about new knowledge and technologies within both our transcendental and everyday knowledge of nature. As a result, technology will change human minds and bodies in ways that will allow us to adapt to the natural environment of the coming world. The astonishing evolution of technology has exceeded the limits of our comprehension, and it is beginning to take on an eerie feeling. The twentieth century psychologist Sigmund Freud referred to this as the “uncanny.” This phenomenon, in which it feels as if something familiar has transformed into something alien, is a powerful aesthetic theme in an age in which AI and biotechnology are deeply integrated into everyday life. When such technology exceeds the limits of human scale and comprehension, both awe and anxiety are engendered by what is considered by this exhibition to be the “technological sublime.” Contemplating contemporary art that evokes this feeling, it seeks to reconsider beauty and awe in the now. Martin Heidegger's essay The Age of the World Picture sees the present as an era of representation in which the dominance of media and technology have become evident, and he presents a critical view of this media society. With humans becoming the agents in the process of representing the world, he calls the world bound together as this representation the “world picture.” He also suggests that by ushering in cooperativity through the media, modern subjectivity could lead to a totalitarian world in which subject and object are immersively united (“planetary imperialism”). Modern society has lauded the “universal values” of freedom, human rights, and democracy. But it has also affirmed limitless human desire, and the capitalism that is driven by this desire has become globalized, leading to fierce competition among nations over their national interests. Based on the premise of a contemporary aporia (a difficult problem with no solution), this exhibition will convey messages from artists who come up with new protocols for communication, intervening in the sphere of public decision-making.


Takayo Iida (Exhibition Curator/Director of the Sgùrr Dearg Institute for Sociology of the Arts)
Ai Makita / Dynamic Equilibrium #b 2025
  • Daisuke Ida / Synoptes 2023
  • Andrea Samory / Chimera 1.1 2023
Ionat Zurr / ExUtero 2023
Andrea Samory
Samory was born in Italy in 1991 and he is now based in Tokyo. In 2017 he completed a master’s degree in architecture at the University of Ferrara in Italy. He creates mythological works examining how information technologies affect the relationship between nature and humanity in the post-internet age. Major solo exhibitions include Overgrowth (Contrast, Tokyo, 2023). Major group exhibitions include One Art Taipei (2024, Taiwan), Art Central HK (2024, Hong Kong), and Generation(Z) (2023, Italy). He was selected as a finalist for 99 Future Blue Chip Artists 2024 (London).
Daisuke Ida
Ida was born in Tottori Prefecture in 1987, and he now lives in Tokyo. He completed a master’s program in sculpture at the Tokyo University of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts in 2015. While interrogating sculpture as a form of expression, he uses a variety of media—including sculpture, video and 3D computer graphics—to visualize the invisible structure of modern society and the attitudes and desires of the people who live in it. Recent solo exhibitions include SYNOPTES (2023, Tezukayama Gallery). Major group exhibitions include Universal/Remote (2024, The National Art Center, Tokyo), The Constitution of JAPAN (2023, AOYAMA|MEGURO, Tokyo), and Grid Island (2022, Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea).
Ai Makita
Ai Makita paints with oils on canvas. Using mechanical motifs, her works aim to create organic images from inorganic elements. One of the themes that she explores is creating material, physical works based on two-dimensional digital data. In particular, she brings digital images into real space as paintings on canvas by creating compositions of photographs of artifacts made of materials like metal and plastic that she has taken herself. Lately she has begun incorporating generative AI into her work, broadening her practice beyond painting to video, print, and installation. Makita has been selected for numerous awards, grants, and residency programs, including the Terrada Art Award, POLA Art Foundation Grant for Overseas Study, Rijksakademie (Royal Netherlands Academy) finalist, ART CAKE (New York), and The Fores Project (London).
Ionat Zurr
Associate Professor Ionat Zurr is an artist and a researcher who formed the Tissue Culture & Art Project in 1996 which led to the establishment of SymbioticA Laboratory the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, the University of Western Australia (UWA) in 2000. She is working at the Fine Arts Discipline, School of Design UWA. Zurr is considered as one of the pioneers in the field of Biological Art. Zurr exhibited in places such as Pompidou Centre in Paris, MoMA NY, Mori art Museum and more. She published extensively and her recent co-authored book: Tissues, Cultures, Art was published by Palgrave McMillan in 2023.

The Coming World 2075_
Technology and the Sublime

Dates
February 11 – March 16, 2025 / 11:00 – 20:00
* gallery closed on February 17
Venue
GYRE GALLERY丨
GYRE 3F, 5-10–1 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
Contact
Navi Dial 0570-05-6990 (11:00–18:00)
Organizer
GYRE Gallery /
Sgùrr Dearg Institute for Sociology of the Arts
Planning & curation
Takayo Iida
(Director of the Sgùrr Dearg Institute for Sociology of the Arts)
Co-curation
Yohsuke Takahashi
Graphic Design
Nanami Norita
Atrium Design
COVA (Taketo Kobayashi, Hikaru Takata, Haruka Ohta)
Exhibiton production cooperation
Artifact
Photography collaboration
Mori Koda
PR direction
HiRAO INC
Exhibiting artists
Ai Makita, Daisuke Ida, Andrea Samory, and Ionat Zurr
PRESS CONTACT
HiRAO INC
#608 1-11-11 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
T/03-5771-8808|F/03-5410-8858
Contact : Seiichiro Mifune / Shohei Suzuki