The word ‘robot’ was invented by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). A story about artificial humans made for forced labour, it struck a big fat chord with the Japanese when it was first performed in Tokyo in 1924. A country with no luddite history, technology has always been eagerly embraced in Japan as a way to help people (with manufacturing, domestic tasks, sex, friendship, etc), and the Japanese remain the world leaders in humanoid, android and animal robotic technology.

But Japan is not only producing machines that are increasingly like humans; we’re also seeing humans becoming more like machines. Continuing the man-as-machine notions posed by the german gynaecologist and illustrator Fritz Kahn, Daito Manabe believes there is no difference between machines and people, and has been inching himself ever closer to cyborgism over the last few years.

The programmer / coder / hacker / light designer / composer / DJ / VJ / video artist / researcher was a headline guest for the Big In Japan! event in Australia last December, and this week we’re bringing him back for live face hacking and DJ sets in Melbourne (30th April, Loop, 23 Meyers Place, free) and Sydney (1st May, Beach Road Hotel, 71 Beach Road Hotel, Bondi, $10 with free Kirin). Go. Or, at the very least, check out his latest work for Nike …

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

The latest from the City of Yokohama’s urban renewal initiative Creative City Yokohama is the CREAM International Festival for Arts and Media. With BankART1929 and the Shinko Pier forming the main venues, the festival is spread around with various satellite exhibitions taking place in the recently regenerated former red-light district Koganecho, and even the polar bear house of the city zoo – confirming the people of Yokohama’s unique skill at instigating innovative new uses of existing city spaces.

Not to be missed is the Lab Space at the end of the Shinko Pier venue, which brings together various groups and individual artists with a focus on interaction through workshops, discussions, lectures, and an open café area. Highlights include an extensive collection of artworks and documents from the Japanese artist-activist collective Remo and the recent experiments of Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), an organization dedicated to making new tools and techniques available for urban communication and public interventions around the world.

The problem the festival faces with being so dispersed is that it is extremely difficult for visitors who aren’t local residents to navigate their way around. Suitable signage, connecting transportation and concise information about the different spaces would help overcome this, but they all seem to be lacking at CREAM 2009, leaving many visitors confused or frustrated.

This is one of the points that has been raised in the debate that has been taking place in the wake of the controversial media preview, where Masaki Fujihata – participating artist, member of the festival committee and professor at Tokyo University of Fine Arts – formally withdrew his participation and handed out a written statement of complaint about the CREAM Director and various facets of the way the festival had been put together (more details on that here).

But despite the Fujihata controversy, the problems with the scattered venues and the wishy-washyness of the overarching “Deep Images” theme, the range of artists and standard of works (with several highlights listed below) make CREAM a worthwhile daytrip out of Tokyo. Perhaps it is just better to consider it as a series of exhibitions rather than an overarching festival with some connecting idea behind it, and to use it as an excuse to get aquatinted with the city of Yokohama, one of Japan’s most interesting new hubs for contemporary art (more on that here).

Behind the scenes of Indonesian artist Eko Nugrohu’s electrically powered shadow puppets.

Horticulture by Osaka-based artist-activist collective Remo.

Shiga Lieko’s Canary (2007), a slideshow of her powerful photography.

Alfredo Jaar’s representative work The Sound of Silence (2006).

From Duane Hopkins captivating multi-screen video installation Sunday (2009).

(Above and below) SHIMURABROS. and Taro Izumi’s mixed-media invasion of the Polar Bear House at the Nogeyama Zoological Garden.

An animalistic audiovisual installation from Makoto Nomura and Yukihiro Nomura, held in an old streetcar at the Nogeyama Zoological Garden.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

As possibly the most contrived and controlled built environments possible, airports are rather surreal places. Like disorienting black holes where time and space cease to exist in the same way, they are sites of heightened emotions (the drama of goodbyes and reunions, the anticipation of new journeys, the panic of missed flights) played out alongside intense boredom. Perfect places, I say, for transparent floating balloon people.

From this week until November 3rd, Terminals 1 and 2 at Haneda Airport will be filled with digital public art projects, including human balloons, LED stars and video projections. Here’s to other international airports taking cue and playing host to more experimental art in the future. See more here (Japanese only).

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 …