An exhibition I put together on a recent Japan Foundation residency in Tokyo, Spooky Action at a Distance is open at Black & Blue Gallery in Sydney for the next two weeks. The show features recent video works from a diverse group of Japanese artists who who have not been shown in Australia before, including the body hacking of Daito Manabe, the strange world of the faceless dance ensemble KATHY, the Super Rat escapades of the controversial Chim↑Pom collective, culinary absurdity from Crazy Hat & Long Ear, kinetic banality from Tetsushi Higashino, reconfigured animalia from Ine wo Ueru hito, deft stop-motion transformation of floors and furniture by Yukihiro Taguchi, and the home made adventures of the self-proclaimed “masters of girl magic”, Kiiiiiii. For individual information on the spooks click on the images below:

Prior to the opening of the Spooky Action at a Distance exhibition tomorrow evening, Dorkbot will be hosting a presentation with body hacker Daito Manabe at 5.30 sharp in gallery. Everyone who saw his incredible performance at the Big In Japan event last night is itching (twitching?) to learn more about his practice, so do come along and hear him talk, and demonstrate the technology he uses. The exhibition opening will follow from at 6.30pm.

Photos by Amelia Groom

Crazy Hat & Long Ears is a duo formed last year by Tama Arts University students Ryoko Iwata and Saki Akiyama. Their Lewis Caroll-esque video works Our full courses and The law of the jungle on the table feature eating, glorious messiness, jungles on tables and general culinary absurdity. Check them out at Spooky Action at a Distance, opening this Friday at Black & Blue Gallery to coincide with the Big In Japan! event on Wednesday. As Ryoko and Saki say, “let’s eat happy”.

Prolific to the extent that only a collective of this many members could be, Chim↑Pom’s garbage, rat, crow, explosion and vomit favouring spur-of-the-moment projects are so broad and bountiful that they are difficult to keep up with.

Having joined forces in 2005 after meeting through Makoto Aida, the six members have really done a lot of stuff in not a lot of time; some of it politically charged, some of it hilarious, some of it just odd. They have, for example:

- Mustered hundreds of wild crows in the sky around the Shibuya 109 department store using a stuffed crow and a loudspeaker broadcasting crow sounds.

- Blown up Louis Vuitton handbags in Cambodian landmines.

- Called little old ladies and tricked them into revealing their bank account details, and then transferred money to them (a reverse Ore Ore scam).

- Filmed Ellie (the group’s only female member) in a pink mini skirt vomiting pink liquid (apparently they had never heard of Mike Parr, who got sick of art in the 1970s).

- Collected feral rats in Tokyo’s Shibuya district and turned them into SUPER☆RATs – taxidermically stuffed and painted to look like Pikachu.

- Held a reverse auction of their work where prices were set as high as $100 million to be bided down until someone was willing to pay the price, with the proceeds going to charity.

- Made miniature figurines out of filth scraped from their bodies.

- Conducted numerous ‘living sand sculptures’ (see above) by painting themselves in sand and posing for prolonged periods at parties or on the beach.

- Held an exhibition where Toshinori, one of the group’s members, spent two weeks with a rat and a crow in a room, living off garbage.

And so on and so forth. Chim↑Pom (meaning something like ‘bunch of penises’) will have a series of video works featured in Spooky Action at a Distance, which opens at 6pm at Black & Blue next Friday and runs for two weeks. BYO strawberry milk.

Image credits: 1. Living Sand Sculpture at Taito Designers Village, 2009, photo by Amelia Groom. 2. Erigero, 2005, courtesy Mujin-to Production, Tokyo. 3. I’m Bokan, 2007, courtesy of Mujin-to Production, Tokyo. 4. BLACK OF DEATH (above 109, Shibuya, Tokyo), 2007, courtesy Mujin-to Production, Tokyo. 5 6, 7.  SUPER☆RAT, 2006, courtesy Mujin-to Production, Tokyo. All images © Chim↑Pom.

Fellow Osakans Tomoko Inagaki and Takuma Uematsu first paired up on the occasion of a group exhibition called I meet … , which showcased various artist collaborations. They hadn’t initially intended to form a unit, but the experience of working together was so rewarding that they decided to join artistic forces, under the moniker Ine wo Ueru hito (meaning “person who plants rice” and incorporating both their names INagaki and UEmatsu).

“The concept of Ine wo Ueru hito is to remove ego and think beyond ourselves,” the artists say. “Usually artists work and think individually. We are both also individual artists and think individually, but in this unit we try to produce work by thinking about and caring for the other. We don’t fight and cherish the process of making the works peacefully.”

Their first collaborative works One day, I meet… Parts 1 + 2 were exhibited in Tokyo at HPGRP Gallery and Nadiff last month, and from next week they will be shown at Spooky Action at a Distance, the Big In Japan exhibition of Japanese video art opening at Black & Blue Gallery on December 4 from 6pm. Combining sculpture, illustration and performance, the two part video is teeming with visual trickery, reconfigured animals and the strangely comforting relentless mundanely of vacuuming.

An omnibus video work compiling several restrained kinetic scenarios that celebrate the ordinary and banal, Tetsushi Higashino’s KINE (above) will be presented at the upcoming Big In Japan exhibition Spooky Action at a Distance. Like all his experiments, it uses the materials of daily life as both media and message. The artist’s other ongoing works in progress include Hydroponic Nose Hair, an attempt to grow a plucked nose hair in water, and Pnoom (below), which sees him sneak around the neighbourhood on garbage collection day, making temporary stacked towers out of empty cans.

For more on Tetsushi see here and here.

When Yukihiro Taguchi (aka Yuki) started out exhibiting installation work, he found himself compelled to alter and evolve the arrangements continually for the duration of his shows. He then realised that his photographic documentation of the changes had a particular interest of their own, and that led to his current practice of performative installation.

Elaborate rearrangements of things are documented by thousands of pictures taken on stop-motion, thereby forming endless reconfigurations of space and time. For his recent exhibition at his Tokyo gallery Mujin-to Productions, Yuki conducted one of his ‘performative sketches’ from the other side of the world. Every nook and cranny of the tiny room (tiny even by Tokyo standards) was covered with his idiosyncratic drawings, including new ones which were sent to the gallery by fax daily from the artist’s base in Berlin. The process was documented by a camera set on automatic in the room, and the images taken will form a video work at a later date.

Other recent projects have applied a similar concept to outdoor public spaces (which Yuki says is much easier to do in Berlin, where the regulation of city space is infinitely more lax than it is in Japan). His acclaimed Moment series, for example, saw him take the wooden boards from a gallery floor and place them in endlessly evolving configurations all over the city – with the third and most recent volume in the series completed in Rio de Janeiro.

While the artist is never seen in the works, his presence is always evident. It is physically demanding stuff, requiring weeks or sometimes months of consistent manual labour and patience. But the results are fascinating, always forcing us to reconsider our relationships to our surroundings.

Yuki recalls that when he returned the floorboards to the gallery floor after taking them away on various adventures for four weeks, the residents of the building and anyone who had visited the installation during the project felt that the boards seemed strangely unnatural back in their original context, as if being removed from their location and function had fundamentally altered them. He took this as confirmation that new relationships with our daily landscapes and material surrounds can and should be explored.

Yukihiro Taguchi’s recent ‘performative sketch’ installation at Mujin-to in Tokyo.

In an earlier series of works, Yuki held gatherings in bubbles and documented their slow deflation.

Floor boards sneaking away and getting up to mischief around Berlin.

With new energy and expression being granted to everyday things like floors, furniture and air, the allure of Yuki’s work is that of the ancient art form of puppetry; making the inanimate animate and creating life from lifelessness.

Yukihiro Taguchi is one of seven Japanese artists to have video work included in Spooky Action at a Distance, opening at Black & Blue Gallery in Sydney at 6pm on December 4, and running until December 19.

I think it would be best if I let Kiiiiiii introduce themselves. Kiiiiiii according to Kiiiiiii:

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drums…..lakin’ a.k.a REIKO TADA

lakin’ the Kiiiiiii loves….

Queen!

PERRY&KINGSLEY, Jackson5, Ramones, mute beat, KRAFT WERK, C-C-B, Yoko minamino….Ra-men, TV programs for Children(like SESAME STREET), Stickers and her cat(named “NYAN”)!

Lakin’ is a illustrater ,a designer and liryc & song writer in Kiiiiii.

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vocal…….ut a.k.a UTAKO TAYAMA

ut loves…..

MICHAEL JACKSON!

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, NEU!, tama, Miho nakayama…..SPAGHETTI, macaron, pho, Cosmetics(Paul&Joe,anna sui…e.t.c) and her dog (named “STOMP”)!

u.t. is an actress in TETSUWARI ALBATROSKET.

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When we met each other for the first time, we were 12 years old. Since then,we have been special friends like DJ & KIMMY in “FULL HOUSE”!

++We play songs by……The Wiggles, Chip munks, Roco’s modern life by NIKELODEON, Hooley dooleys, Michael Jackson, and kiiiiiii ( Almost all songs are written by Lakin’ except for cover songs.)!

Live footage and video works by Kiiiiiii will be featured at the Big In Japan event (CarriageWorks, December 2) and exhibition (Black & Blue Gallery, December 5-19), so you can get yourselves properly acquainted with the self proclaimed “masters of girl magic”.

Illustrations by Tada Reiko of Kiiiiiii.

You 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 …

“Everything is under surveillance of KATHY. Orders are constantly issued by KATHY. And the 3 are due to get their duties done.”

So their bio makes it hard to figure out exactly what is going on here but when you see their live shows you’ll understand. Actually, wait, their shows are even more obscure and bamboozling … But that’s ok because they are also mind blowingly amazing.

Classically trained as ballerinas, the unnamed dancers of KATHY collaborated extensively with the legendary Nagi Noda and share her love of strange cuteness, surrealist-pop, and hair. Always clad in identical blond wigs with black pantyhosed faces, they render themselves completely featureless (and fingerless) because anonymity is the ideal point of surveillance. Their eerie and ritualistic performances are like nothing else; think Moulin Rouge meets Victorian morality meets Lucifer rising.

And … they are one of our first confirmed guests for the Big In Japan event that is taking place this December at CarriageWorks. We are very excited to be announcing that KATHY will be on our program, along with the Trippple Nippples and others to be announced very soon. It’s shaping up to be a very special night of Japanese performance artists, experimental musicians, DJs and visual artists who have never been brought out to Australia before.

KATHY, you might be watching us but we’re watching you back, we can’t take our eyes off you. The girls are cooking up some big surprises for the event but for the time being lets just say I bags not cleaning up all the pigeon shit. Stay tuned.

First image by honagayoko, last image by Yumiko Inoue (D-CORD)