Body hacker daito manabe coming to sydney for big in japan
BIJ event, BIJ exhibition, media art, soundYou might be one of the 1.4 million who have already watched this unnerving/mesmerising Youtube clip, originally posted as an experiment to show a friend but subsequently spawning a series of copycats and launching Daito Manabe to an unexpected level of celebrity.
But Daito is not just a geeky guy Youtubecasting himself from his bedroom doing fucked up things with gadgets on his face. Since graduating as a mathematician he has been active as a researcher, programmer, coder, hacker, sound / light designer, composer, DJ, VJ, video artist, and this list goes on.
Working in collaboration with anybody from synchronised swimmers to textile workers, engineers, dancers, academics, visual artists and corporations, he explores creative misuses of existing technology to look at new possibilities of human interaction with computers.
The vice president for web / interactive design firm Rhizomatiks in Japan, he has just been on tour at various media arts festivals and events around Europe and will be shooting off for projects in New Zealand and Brazil before appearing in Sydney for a very special performance at the Big In Japan event on December 2. So I was lucky to catch him in Tokyo; we caught up over a strawberry latte to talk about his various projects and the future of human beings and machines …
I think there’s a lot of people who are wary of new technologies because they see them as reducing human interaction or isolating people, but your work seems to be about reassessing how technology can be used and showing how it can actually open up new sorts of social interaction. What do you think?
I think it just takes time for people to feel comfortable with new technologies. I believe that it won’t be long before everybody will have sensors in their bodies and the data collected by them will be centralised, so for example we could get warnings when we have been infected with something. At first there will be privacy concerns but we will get past that; there was a time when people were concerned about robots reading our emails in our Gmail accounts and selecting the advertisements we see, but nobody thinks about it now. We are already being analysed by robots so next is applying it to the body.
Why do you think Japan is so technologically advanced?
Good water.
Really?
And the way we have passed information on through generations. Nintendo started in Japan in the 1800s as a manufacturer of playing cards, and it has gone on to train generations and develop further and further. I think I actually learned a lot from playing Nintendo games as a kid. Their ideas were very advanced – because it was a company it had a much bigger budget than the researchers in other countries who were exploring the same areas, and they were able to be more imaginative and playful than those in the academic domain.
You seem to be very focused on interaction and sharing ideas, you hold a lot of talks and workshops for example …
Yes we hold BodyHack workshops where participants learn to use their bodies as electronic input and output devices, to have their movements control or be controlled by computers. They can experiment with myoelectric sensors and low frequency devices to learn how information flows in our bodies and how the body reacts to electric signals. We encourage them to think about alternative uses of technologies and the ways we interact with them. I have done educational workshops for children too which is fun.
Can you tell me about the recent workshop/exhibition you held in Harajuku with the industrial sewing machines?
Pa++ern was a project where we hooked up an industrial embroidery machine with Twitter so people could send different coding that was applied to T-shirts. The motivation was to take the ideas outside the domain of geeks by applying them to everyday clothing.
So what’s next for you?
I want to experiment with transcranial magnetic stimulation, which can affect different parts of the brain (eg speech) with pulsed magnetic fields, but you need a license so I’m trying to find a way …
[...] direct from Tokyo early next week, special guests KATHY, Daito Manabe, Mademoiselle Yulia and the Trippple Nippples will be performing live alongside the local [...]
Pingback by Big In Japan — November 24, 2009 @ 6:22 pm[...] here to read Manabe’s explanations for his work, and to see more videos. You can also find his [...]
Pingback by Daito Manabe… — Res Infinitus — December 14, 2009 @ 10:30 pm