Seiko Mikami en/memoriVm.:.A Faux Catalog

Exhibition: Seiko Mikami :en/memorivm

“Nothing goes unnoticed by the machine system, nothing gets lost, everything is captured.”

Seiko Mikami PLATFORMS _on_ PLATFORMS

Our technology builds upon crumbling previous layers of older and decaying generations, like rubble and stone shifting downhill sediment the ground. From this ground lain, Japanese artist Seiko Mikami emerges, mapping the groundwork for artists of the fourth industrial revolution, the approaching quantum networks of Web3. Under their pressure, mountains of datum form information crystals. As art, such a crystal was created by Mikami in her installation “Information War” in July 1989. Growths of techno-crystal terminations glow blue and cast shadows. A halo remains on the gallery walls, a trace of radioactivity left indelibly made.

Mikami’s new media art is proof that arts in tech create myths en tout point. These are proof of realized projected visions for cultural structure. In Mikami’s machine vision/perception installation of 2010, Desire of Code, information is the paint to the painter; datum is the flow of life for Mikami. There is a limited archive surrounding Mikami, but this showing, revisiting, and continuation of her work strengthens that archive. Mikami’s art risks and challenges as it playfully endangers, as she teases safety and the limitations of the onlookers by playing with their threshold for risk. These are signs of meaningful artworks, introduced in this catalog/essay with notes about other writers’ theoretical and critical implications and a review of Noi Sagaragi’s 2016 six-part memorial essay/blog commentary “Seiko Mikami, Media Artist or Was She?” is given specific honest attention.

Sadly, Seiko Mikami passed away too soon in 2016, and the world, indeed the whole world, lost a visionary artist and Mikami’s vision for a networked co-curation of tech, art, and the affective body. Inasmuch, we are in Seiko’s future. Acknowledgment and respect are given to her closest kin and community, who must attest to her genius. To see this, one need only look at advancements in machine vision and perception, which Mikami herself developed since the earliest days of technological retinal eye movement and facial recognition innovations. She has been called an Avatar of Virtual Worlds by Machiko Kusara, who created impressive and evocative environments but distanced herself from Japanese cultural heritage. Genetics plays only a conceptual role in her art, Molecular Informatics (1996), but information passed through and stored within bodies in networks does. Mikami’s vision and art commenced the aesthetic age of Networked Bio-Informatics.

“Perception largely takes place behind people’s back.”

-Seiko Mikami. In her essay the Self Referentiality of Perception: The Ear Does Not Hear, The Eye Does Not See

In a soundproof room, visitors experience the loss of corporeality as precisely under erasure, vibrations created by the body are dampened by the soundproof walls. The impression the visitor leaves with is a fragmented body.

In fig.2 is a diagram schema for the flow of bio-information, known today as Bio-metric data. Ein Robinson from Drop Box calls this “users’ product interactions and device attributes”because it sounded harsh as it was. Through the system built by Mikami, this fragmentation, in her own words, was the aesthetic experience desired by the artist, a sentiment, perhaps a too familiar experience. A powerful woman and artist, Mikami has been referred to as a cyber-feminist and revolutionary. Fragmentation, danger, risk, and isolation are all knowledge entombed within bodies that have experienced the like. Explorations through the world of bio-informatics, genres of biology, and technology traverse, and perhaps through a reversal, this knowledge can pass through and between bodies. In the case of Mikami and her artwork’s visitors, they receive more than what they exchange in terms of information. Traditional bases of self-knowledge, now disrupted by bio-medical data mining, were directly engaged with and challenged by Mikami in great and climactic ways. Through the changing relationship between human beings and their technology, in her code of emergence, everything becomes abstract information in the interest of scientific rationalization between human bodies and technology. Mikami’s artistic power is to reconceptualize ways that facilitate the interaction of such desired codes between bodies in space.

World Membrane and the Dismembered Body 1997

Gravicells: Gravity and Resistance 2004

“Super density and the assessment given to

gravity could be called the 6th consciousness. Our body keeps balance via the inner ears. The relational nature of gravity and the body is deep. This connection is also present within the theoretical subject matter in my past work. The interface itself exists inside us. Our body is equipped with a thing like the consciousness function which detects gravity, and a gravity sensor. It is said that these gravity sensors progress at the time of a fetus when it is in a mother’s belly.” Seiko Mikami

Shown for one year at InterCommunication Center Tokyo in 2008 and 2010, it is essential to note that Gravicells, by Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, is accessible to all bodies across time or cultures. Not common to all, but most senses like acoustic, visual, or the sensation of gravity are relatable to every sensing body.

As the viewer steps onto the installation ground, a shadowless world emerges from the intensity of luminescence cast directly overhead. Images from the multi-projection installation surround visitors with the super density of their existence. Jung E Choi (Art History and Visual Studies BA, MA, PhD. Duke U.) lauds Gravicells by saying depth is the most existential of dimensions. Choi articulates the way Gravicells presents depth itself as the pimary spatial medium that grounds the interrelationship between bodies and the world. Gravicells grants its space agency to immaterialize and de-propertize space. In more common terms, Gracicell’s space is one of interdependent mutuality. Choi concludes, Gravicells is a reinforcement of intrinsic interrelationships between human experiences with affective engagements in their built environments. Arguably Mikami is a device artist, rather than a new media artist, Mikami catches machines “behaving” responsive to humans, this instructs and directs public mind towards a communicative semi-sentience. Capacity to measure and move takes on an organic character, human and machine perception suggests extended intelligence.

Lit. Review — Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 1–6. Remembering Seiko Mikami, Media Artist, or Was She?

A memorial essay that covers all of Mikami’s artwork except for her paintings, World membrane: Disposal Containers 1993, Information Weapons “Super Clean Room” 1990.

World membrane: Disposal Containers 1993.

Information Weapons “Super Clean Room” 1990.

A very large installation whose documentation is sparse in its two recognizable forms, notwithstanding a book by Art Random by Kyoto Shoin. Mikami and Jae-Eun Choi are matched for their choice to use darkness and light to manipulate onlookers’ consciousness of spacial awareness.

TO BE CONTINUED/.

Annotated Bibliography

Yvonne Spielmann* Perceptual-responsive environments: sense and sensibility in Japanese media artist Seiko Mikami’s installations. Note. The author mistakes Mikami’s gender referring to her as male. The author uses the word device artist

Yvonne Spielmann. Hybrid Culture Japanese Media Arts in Dialogue with the west. Leonardo. The MIT Press Cambridge, London. 2013.

Stephen Wilson. Information Arts — Intersections of Art Science and Technology. Self Published. 2002. pp. 188 585 176–177. About gaze and communication technology, with Mikami’s earlier work. Molecular Bioinformatics and Molecular Clinic where visitors can influence the

Nina Czegledy and Andre P. Czegledy. The Body As Password: Biometrics and Corporeal Dispossession. Filoszofski vestnik v23 2 . p 75–92. Note: The authors mistake Mikami’s gender as male.

Seiko Mikami. The Self Referentiality of Perception — The Ear Does Not Hear, The Does Not See. Lecture by Seiko Mikamiduring the Machine Aesthetic Student Seminar (1997).

Noi Sawaragi. Remembering Seiko Mikami, media artist — or was she? i-vi. 2015. Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 49–52.

Jung E. CHOI. The Architecture of Depth: Gravicells as a critical Spatial Practice in the 21st Century (1). Dept. of Art History and Visual Studies. Duke University. (34:2) 1–12. 2017. Notes p4 Merlo-Ponty in 1968. Depth is the most existential of dimensions. Gravicells present depth itself as the primary spacial medium that grounds the interrelationship between bodies and the world. Gravicells grants its space agency to immaterialize and de-propertize space. In more common terms, Gravicells presents its visitors’ space as a place of interdependent mutuality.

Andreas Broeckmann. Machine Art in the Twentieth Century. 2016. The MIT Press. Cambridge. p211 “..Extending and transforming the perceptual range.”

Andreas Broeckmann. 2004. Processes and Artistic Practice. Leonardo Vol 37. No 4 pp 281–284. On feedback loops, Seiko Mikami uses the perceptual system of installation visitors to create techno-physio logical feedback loops.

Dominic Landwehe on behalf Migros Kulturprozent Christoph Merian Verlag. Edition Digital Culture Machines and Robots. Ed 2018. Note: Adreas Broeckmann says on machine art. : p184 the figures of the robot and the machine become apparent as mythological projections intended to confirm the ontological difference between humans and technics. p185 Humans and machines are mutually conditional and develop together. On Gravicells: Gravity and Resistance, the field of interdependencies, like natural gravity, weight, movement of the installation, and satellites in orbit.

Dekker G. Geodome. Networked Co-Curation: An Exploration of the Socio-Technical Specificities of Online Curation Annet Dekker 1,2,* and Gaia Tedone 2019.

Practicable: From interaction to participation in participatory art. Ed Seameul Bianchini And Erik Verhagen. Seiko Mikami Interviewed by Hiroko Myokam. 2016. During an interview, possibly given with or without knowledge of her nearing, she used these words: I produce installation focused around things like cracks and crevices, Gravicells deals with directional fissures, while Desire of codes deals with flesh and blood.”

In Conversation With the VIDA 15.0 jury: Seiko Mikami. https://vida.fundaciontelefonica.com/en/2013/06/04/in-conversation-with-the-vida-15-0-jury-seiko-mikami/ Posted by Pau Waelder on Jun 4, 2013. Note: Seiko Mikami quoted

Appendix i

NOTE

On the appearance of Mariko Mori on the international art scene but a notable absence of Seiko Mikami’s art from the perspective of published sources, journals, or periodicals. I’m doing my research at a private arts college in San Francisco and I have four overly produced hardbound books on the art of Mori, but a search for a single published art book for Mikami lead to only two thin photo books, although of very high quality. This is from the exhibition curated by American artist Robert Longo. This information is also mentioned by Noi Sawaragi when mentioning a shift in the style of Mikami’s art. The previous was more assembled from junk parts, the latter was high technological. I would like to emphasize that the technology she was working on is now heavily integrated into every aspect of society. She was using advanced technologies to make art.