Capable of communicating thousands of nuances of emotion with tiny tweaks of muscles, the human face is a pretty strange phenomenon. The work of techno artist and ‘body hacker’ Daito Manabe has returned regularly to the face since his experiment electric face stimulus, which he performed live at Big In Japan 2009. His most recent projects have had him disconnect the cables from his flesh and turn instead to lasers: in Fade Out, a collaborative work by Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi, an image of the artist’s face taken by IR camera is transmitted to a phosphorescent screen via live laser-beam irradiation, and gradually reproduced through the interplay of light and shadow …

An earlier laser experiment by Daito:

Ideas that have broken free from “the suffocating historical dominance of conservative utility”. That was how Kenji Kawakami described his Chindōgu movement of useless consumer products.

Maywa Denki operate on a slightly different principle of nonsense machine instrumentation. The director Nobumichi Tosa might be continuing from where Jean Tinguely’s metamechanics or Reuben Goldberg and Heath Robinson’s superfluous machinery left off, but his language is very much grounded in Japan’s hyper-consumerist culture. Dressed in the blue suit uniforms of Japanese electric store workers, he refers to Maywa Denki’s live performances as ‘product demonstrations’ and holds Nonsense Idea Conceiving Workshops.

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

Kenji Yanobe’s plastic, metal and steel sculptures embody the same industrial-futuristic aesthetic that sends Japanese consumers (and quite frankly, the rest of us) into a spending frenzy. Yet Kenji’s mission is much darker than the likes of Bearbrick or Mr TTT: all of the artist’s creations are built from a nuclear holocaust. Not however, the one that affected Japan 20 years before his birth, but one that continues to radiate from television screens all over the country.

Much of Kenji’s work is made with reference to the otaku generation; kids whose worlds are saturated in comics, television and robotics. Such mediums are of course entertainment, but their stories are frequently concerned with the darker side of human existence; one that denies its humanity in favour of power. In such media, the machine straddles both sides of the divide, as both a human ally and destructor.

Growing up with this kind of stimulus, Kenji’s 3D works are at once cute and chilling. For his current exhibition at bld gallery in Tokyo, Kenji has created an installation of Mini Toyarans, based on his iconic Giant Toyaran sculpture. Part man, part child and dressed in a nuclear suit, Toyaran is modelled on a ventriloquist’s dummy used by Kenji’s father. Running until August 9, the exhibition features a legion of Mini Toyaran. This small army might stand at 10% of the size of their predecessor, but they are 100% as fascinating (and frightening!).

]]> http://biginjapan.com.au/2009/07/giant-mini-toyaran/feed/ 0