September 27 – 24 November 24, 2019.
Held in Okayama City, Japan once every three years, the Okayama Art Summit brings contemporary art to various historical and cultural sites near Okayama Castle and Okayama Korakuen Garden. For the 2019 summit “IF THE SNAKE”, directed by artist Pierre Huyghe, Mika Tajima debuted the works New Humans, Force Touch (Corporis), and Human Synth (Okayama).
In New Humans (2019), emergent gatherings of synthetic humans rise from the surface of a black ferrofluid pool. Appearing to morph like a supernatural life form, these dynamic clusters of magnetic liquid produced by machine learning processes are images of communities of synthetic people — hybrid profiles modeled from actual DNA, fitness, and dating profile data sets sourced from public and leaked caches. The work questions how we can radically conceptualize the “user profile” to embody a self whose bounds are indefinable and multiple.
Arranged in an array outlining body meridian points, Force Touch (Corporis) (2019) is a large-scale wall sculpture of embedded air jet diffusers emitting forced air into the exhibition space. The work relates to the haptic technology used for touch screens and track pads, mediating skin and machinic surface. In line with the ethics of brutalist architecture to expose a building’s function, the air jets reveal the macro map of controlled energy flows of the body.
The animated smoke visible in Human Synth (Okayama) (2019) is produced in real time using a computer game engine that transmutes information on human emotional states into an evolving image. The work uses extractive technology that mines the current sentiment of a population and predicts future human expressions using a computer algorithm. In this way the work invokes the pre-modern practice of capnomancy that used the movement and shape of ceremonial smoke to envision future action.
Organizer: Okayama Art Summit Executive Committee（Okayama City, Ishikawa Foundation, Okayama Prefecture）
Executive Producer: Yasuharu Ishikawa, President, Ishikawa Foundation
Executive Director: Taro Nasu, Owner, TARO NASU
Artistic Director: Pierre Huyghe
Artists: Tarek Atoui, Matthew Barney, Etienne Chambaud, Paul Chan, Ian Cheng, Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, John Gerrard, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Glass Bead, Elizabeth Hénaff, Eva L’Hoest, Fernando Ortega, Sean Raspet, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Pamela Rosenkranz, Tino Sehgal, Mika Tajima.
