Experimenta: Australia-Japan Media Art collaboration and exhibition (Sendai Mediatheque)

Australia-Japan Media Art collaboration and exhibition

26 November ? 25 December 2006
Open each day 10:00am-7:00pm
General Admission 500 Yen
Tel: +81 (0)22-713-4483

Re:search ? art collaboration between Australia and Japan opens on 26th November
at Sendai Mediatheque, Japan. The exhibition of new site-specific works by four
Australian and three Japanese media artists is the result of a collaborative project
between Sendai Mediatheque (SMT) and Melbourne-based Experimenta for the
2006 Australia-Japan Year of Exchange.

Have all modern cities become standardised and formulaic? What is it that makes a
place tick? In this exhibition the audience becomes integral in the experience of
capturing the vibrancy and dynamism of the city?s energy: the private and communal
spaces that make it unique.

Sendai Mediatheque curator, Kent Shimizu, invited the artists to spend two weeks in
the Miyagi prefecture to explore Sendai, its environs and the remarkable architecture
of the SMT building by Japanese architect Toyo Ito. The media artworks respond to
the constructed environment, the natural environment and the social and cultural
context through the use of high definition video, video projection and photography,
electromagnetic field recordings, multichannel sound and other interactive screenbased
media. Through their different artistic practices each artist expresses what is
unique and ideal about the local, in this case Sendai, in the face of the global
homogeneity of the modern city. They reveal aspects, which usually go unnoticed,
that are just beneath the surface of Sendai; a thriving cultural hub which is the
precinct?s capital and two hours north of Tokyo.

Artists: Alex Davies, Craig Walsh, David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, The SINE
WAVE ORCHESTRA, Lieko Shiga, Norimichi Hirakawa

Craig Walsh, who most recently participated in the Yokohama Triennale of Art and
Fuji Rock Festival, has produced large-scale projections and billboards for this
exhibition. Titled Big in Japan, the work features the giant image of the artist
embedded in advertising billboards and explores the possibility of fabricated truths by
transforming the way the residents experience their city.

Alex Davies? mixed reality installations play with time and challenge our perceptions
of lived experience. His new work Conversations: Intimate moments with random
strangers explores the micro interactions that occur between individuals. Fleeting
moments that often go unnoticed in our day-to-day social interactions are
extrapolated to reveal the strangely intimate connections that occur in a society in
which our interactions are becoming ever increasingly electronically mediated.

David Haines and Joyce Hinterding?s work concerning natural phenomena has
been shown at the Tate gallery, London and at the Sao Paolo Biennale, Brazil. In this
work titled Electromagnetique Composition for Building, Plants & Stars the artists
wrap a column on the 6th floor of the SMT building with 16km of copper wire to create
a giant coil antenna that captures and amplifies the local electromagnetic energy
within the building and the background noise of distant galaxies such as the Milky
Way. A high definition video projection of overgrown weedy plants sits in counterpoint
to the column and reveals a hidden order between the constructed and the wild.

The Sine Wave Orchestra is best known for sound works that are generated by
audience members playing an object that emanates an audible sound frequency. In
their new work, titled The Sine Wave Orchestra mediate, eight flat objects with a
fader dial and speaker hang from the ceiling of the exhibition space, each generating
a sine wave controlled by the participants. The resulting organic score represents
communication between them in an abstract form.

The photographs in Lieko Shiga?s The Golden Mirage make use of optical effects
that blur the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary, reality and fiction by
recording real people and circumstances interweaved with fiction.

Norimichi Hirakawa?s work expresses the relation between information space and
physical space. Compath comprises a movable device fitted with a GPS, multi
channel sound and projection. Images of the sky are captured with a video camera
attached to a car as it drives through Sendai and the images are then projected onto
the ceiling of the gallery. The images generate curiosity and transform the experience
of everyday reality for the gallery visitor.

Images of the artists? previous works can be viewed at;
http://www.smt.city.sendai.jp/research/artists_e/

http://www.experimenta.org/