Shrewd new sound sculpture by rising star Lyota Yagi. You can see+hear them in revolutionary action here. Balls of cassette on modified cassette players. Yagi’s work often brings him back to the tangibility of analog sound technologies: I included his melting ice ‘vinyl’ records in the video art exhibition for the 2010 Big In Japan events, and since then he has also located audio information in the microgrooves of human fingerprints. The Sound Spheres were recently included in a group show in Budapest, where Yagi made this eight minute video condensing seven days.

And, here’s what Wikipedia has on the Musica Universalis:

The Music of the Spheres incorporates the metaphysical principle that mathematical relationships express qualities or ‘tones’ of energy which manifest in numbers, visual angles, shapes and sounds – all connected within a pattern of proportion. Pythagoras first identified that the pitch of a musical note is in proportion to the length of the string that produces it, and that intervals between harmonious sound frequencies form simple numerical ratios.

In a theory known as the Harmony of the Spheres, Pythagoras proposed that the Sun, Moon and planets all emit their own unique hum based on their orbital revolution, and that the quality of life on Earth reflects the tenor of celestial sounds which are physically imperceptible to the human ear.

In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler, also influenced by arguments in Ptolemy’s Optics and Harmonica, compiled his Harmonices Mundi (’Harmony of the World’), which presented his own analysis of optical perceptions, geometrical shapes, musical consonances and planetary harmonies. According to Kepler, the connection between geometry (and sacred geometry), cosmology, astrology, harmonics, and music is through musica universalis.

Sound artist Mamoru Okuno at Big in Japan last year, performing his etude no. 39 variation for sharing noodles, a work he developed for our 2010 events. An exhibition of this work at YUKA CONTEMPORARY gallery in Tokyo in April saw a hundred and eighty people from around the world send instant noodles to help Mamoru raise funds for the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami relief efforts. Mamoru is currently artist in residence at the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre and involved in their exhibition Re-Modernologio. On September 18 he will perform some of his ‘etudes for everyday life’ there. This week he is in Taiwan, where he is performing the noodle etude at Art Taipei. He also has work in the exhibition Invisibleness is Visibleness at MOCA in Taipei. Earlier this year he published his first book which chronicles all his etudes. More on Mamoru here.

Tokyo-based sound/assemblage artist Ujino Muneteru’s band The Rotators is made up of musicians made by Ujino Muneteru. Prefacing his work as an homage to Futurism and Dada, he meddles with turntables, furniture, automobiles, electrical tools and household appliances like hair dryers and blenders, calling them his ‘Rotators’, and working with them to build up invasively loud noise that turns out to be far more ordered than the chaotic semblance would suggest …

Aristotle called on eating as the primal function of the soul. Whether in literal digestion of food or the more subtle consumption involved in sensual processing like seeing and hearing, in the act of consuming the Aristotelian soul was taking something foreign and transforming it into itself.

Instant noodles, for instance, seem to be so unlike us and yet our bodies can easily incorporate them – and through looking and listening we also take things inside us, assimilating them into our being with our subjective perceptual apprehension.

Sound artist Mamoru Okuno has been working with the idea of basic consumption for several years now. We spoke to him in April about the sonic values of soda water and plastic drinking straws, and last month he performed in Sydney and Melbourne at our 2010 Big in Japan events.

Using an audio loop to deftly build up the surprisingly diverse sounds involved in preparing instant noodles, he finished his live sets by inviting people from the audience to eat the fresh steamy bowels of ramen with him.

A common misconception of eternity is that is means lots and lots of time, when really it amounts to no-time. Eternity has no beginning, end or duration: it is timelessness in the most literal sense.

In 2008 the Paris-based Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda began a continued dialogue with Harvard mathematician and number theorist Benedict Gross (thanks to Le Laboratoire, a not-for-profit institute set up for artists and scientists to work on joint projects). Their points of discussion spanned the purity of complex and prime numbers, fractional dimension, the impossibility of knowing whether the random is really random, the infinity of points between 0 and 1, and the controversial mathematical theory that V is not equal to L.

Last year Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art held a major retrospective of Ikeda’s work, +/−, drawing on the his ideas about “the infinite between 0 and 1” (nothing and something) and incorporating parts of his dialogues with Gross. In 2010 he returned to Japan to tour his synesthetic live work cyclo., the result of a collaborative research project with Carsten Nicolai which focuses on the visualisation of sound.

He was also part of this year’s Aichi Triennale in Japan, where he used 64 high-powered floodlights and a symphony of ultra pure sine sound waves to re-create his Tower of Light (above) from Nagoya Castle. For one night only blinding white light sliced through the night sky into a single vanishing point 10 kilometers above.

Ikeda’s other compositions, installations, video works and sculptures often use ultrasonic waves or frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing in order to investigate the nature of sound and how humans perceive time and space:

Showing until the end of December, Ikeda has a solo show at Galley Koyanagi in Tokyo, including a suite of video installations from his Datamatics body of work and new pieces from his V≠L series:

Sounds are invisible vibrations travelling through space that may be heard if they reach an ear. Lyota Yagi makes his sounds temporarily tangible by taking silicon casts from his favourite records, filling them with water, and freezing them. These frosty ‘vinyls’ hold entire compositions that proceed to melt into puddles, the music gradually becoming audibly and materially degraded.

In contrast to rock star guitar smashing or George Maciunas’ Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, these works are founded on a premise of self-destruction, where they fall victim to the natural law of entropy – the second property of thermodynamics which states that all energy is eventually neutralized.

Lyota’s video work Time Cosmique documents several of these ephemeral sonic sculptures as well as select other projects, and will be presented as part of the curated video art component of our Big In Japan events this month. Crossing multiple disciplines of sculpture, interactive installation, performance and video, the artist’s previous works have continued similar themes of sound in relation to time and space, and often returned to the revolving form of the vinyl record …

The sun’s light comes to us from 150 million kilometers away, taking around eight minutes to arrive, without ever making a sound. With his fluorescent lighting instrument ‘optron’, Atsuhiro Ito introduces light to explosive noise and forces the two to cohabit, while darkness and silence get friendly in the apartment below. His performances and installations are disorienting synesthetic experiences that feel both primal and futuristic. Ito also plays in the “extreme optical noise core band” Optrum with drummer Yoichiro Shin. Between 2000 and 2005 he presented regular exhibitions and performances at his now-defunct independent gallery/venue Off Site in Tokyo, and since 2009 he has operated under his own label GOTOBAI recordings.

>>>> This November Atsuhiro Ito will perform in Sydney and Melbourne for our Big In Japan! events.

Above: installation works by Atsuhiro Ito. Below: Ito  performing at Ensembles 2009.

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 …

John Cage discovered there was no such thing as silence when he sat in a noiseproof anechoic chamber and heard for the first time the cacophonous sounds of his own body, including the ‘high’ sound of the blood’s circulation and the ‘low’ sound of the nervous system. In 1952 he wrote what he considered to be his best composition, 4’33”. Although commonly perceived to be four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, it actually consists of the perpetual sounds of the surrounding environment, which the audience is made sensitive to as the performer creates as little noise as possible.

In a similar vein, Mamoru Okuno is interested in making people aware of the sounds they hear all the time but never listen to. His recent exhibition at YUKA CONTEMPORARY in Tokyo had him preaching the unique sonic values of orange juice and soda, as well as continuing to spread the good word about the instrumental possibilities of plastic drinking straws. The show was part of his ongoing live, participatory series ‘etude for everyday objects and practices’, which have in the past involved listening to things like melting ice cubes or scrunched-up clingwrap, and usually include shared consumption of food or drink in some form.

Mamoru says his work is informed by the likes of Michel de Certeau and Nicolas Bourriaud, but also by Japan’s ancient art of the tea ceremony, as reformed by Sen no Rikyu in the 16th Century. Rikyu advocated the use of humble, everyday materials, which would be invested with high spiritual and aesthetic tenets through their inclusion in the rituals. Incorporating anything from performance to architecture, garden/interior design, flower arrangement and ceramics, The Way of Tea is founded on unscripted human exchange and could be considered one of the truest forms of multidisciplinary, interactive and ephemeral live art.

If people react to Mamoru’s work with “I could do that”, he knows he’s on the right track. His simple aim is to facilitate new experiences of everyday objects, and thereby position the individual as creator of their own experience.

Mamoru is currently growing his own vegetables in his room at Tokyo Wonder Site (where he has a one-year residency) for his 36th etude, ‘water and dry earth / variation for growing plants’, based on the subtle, fleeting sound of dry plants being watered; and at the end of April he will be hosting a three-day show in his hometown, Osaka, at projectroom ift.

Image rights reserved by Mamoru Okuno / YUKA CONTEMPORARY.

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.

On the rooftop of an abandoned school near the flashing lights and madness of Tokyo’s Akihabara Electric Town, there is a nightly happening comprising kinetic sculpture, balloons, instrumental inventions, light, sound and performance art.

Without chronology, centre or climax the series of improvisations unfold as the sun goes down and a harmonious atmosphere envelops all. Rest-ful Musical Devices is a part of Ensembles, an initiative by avant-garde musician Otomo Yoshihide which is taking place in various venues around Tokyo. Thinking about the highly individualised way people listen to music today, with earphone straight on eardrum, Otomo wanted to focus on making sound within space, emphasising the interactive and social dimensions of music.

The line up includes some of Japan’s most interesting performers and experimental sound artists: Atsuhiro Ito, Fuyuki Yamakawa, Yuko Mohri, Sachiko M, Tetsuya Umeda and Kanta Horio. A pretty special evening if you’re in Tokyo any time between now and November 3.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

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 …