Sapporo Community Plaza

The first exhibition in asia of a legendary piece of media art history

The Sapporo Cultural Arts Community Center SCARTS will serve as the gateway for visitors to SIAF2020. SCARTS will host an exhibition of Senster, a large-scale, computer-controlled kinetic sculpture that responds to surrounding sounds. Originally made at the end of the 1960s, it was believed lost for over 40 years. Recently rediscovered and restored, its presentation at SIAF2020 marks its first appearance in Asia. SCARTS will also introduce cutting-edge performances from Japan and overseas.

Moerenuma Park

Interactive artworks in a vast landscape of snow

At Moerenuma Park, the visitors will be offered insights in the sphere of human activities that unfold between roots and clouds, resulting now with the global environmental crisis or surveillance as the basis for oppressive societal and business models. Besides the exhibitions at the Glass Pyramid and the snow storage units used to keep snow for cooling the facility during summer, outdoor projects unique to the winter setting will be carried out at Mt. Moere. The work by pioneering artist Seiko Mikami will be presented in Moerenuma Park. Having passed away unexpectedly in 2015, she still continues to have much impact on a whole generation of artists working with media technology today. Her famous installation Desire of Codes was recently restored by a team of specialists according to the artist’s intentions and updated with the latest technology. This version of the famous work will receive its world premiere at SIAF2020.

Sapporo Art Park

Encounters with media art in a forest of art

The exhibition at Sapporo Art Park will focus on media art, its different facetes and histories, revealing what is hidden behind sleeky websites and smart devices we use daily. While interacting with the artworks, the visitors will be given the space for playful reflection on the rapid advance of technology and its manifold connections to art and science. Presented in two venues, including the Craft Hall, the exhibition will feature families-friendly artworks to be appreciated by grown-ups and kids alike.

Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art

Dream pairings of past and present, renowned masterpieces and New Works

Having long contributed to the development of culture in Sapporo and Hokkaido, the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art itself embodies the festival theme “Of Roots and Clouds.” The exhibits at the venue will re-examine the mesh of mutual influences from Hokkaido history, geography, environment, and culture. The museum’s collection of artists from Hokkaido will resonate and harmonize with a selection of contemporary art in the first such attempt to integrate the museum collection with an art festival on this scale.

Migishi Kotaro Museum of Art, Hokkaido (mima)

Keyword: 31 years old

This venue will exhibit work by Kotaro Migishi as well as by other artists from Hokkaido and elsewhere created when they were 31 years old, the same age as Migishi when he died. The exhibition is based on a plan developed by the artists Satoru Aoyama and Ryosuke Hara, whose work will also appear.

Shiryokan (Former Sapporo Court of Appeals)

Daily experiments unfolding at a cultural property

At the Shiryokan which is a designated Tangible Cultural Property of Sapporo, new works will be presented by artists whose practices are closely related to the festival’s theme. The exhibition will occupy the whole venue, indoors and outdoors, featuring artworks dealing with the idea of sustainability as well as the history of the venue itself. An artistic experiment is planned to take place throughout the festival: an artist will try to camp in the front yard outside the building.

Sapporo Odori 500-m Underground Walkway Gallery

Hunt for yourself in a kaleidoscope of people and other species

Utilizing its particular specificity, this venue will be used for exhibiting a huge panoramic computer drawing by Klaus Pobitzer. His new work will feature portraits of local residents, historical figures, pop stars, politicians, robots and other strange beings, mixing past and present, facts, fiction and post-truth. An invitation for the viewers to consider what is truth today, in a medialized reality saturated by the on-line information.

Re:Senster

Re:Senster has been a project at AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland to reactivate a large-scale cybernetic sculpture. Senster was created by Edward Ihnatowicz, a sculptor of Polish origin working in London. Made in 1968, it is considered a masterpiece in the history of new media art.
Senster is a five-meter-long steel kinetic sculpture, its frame and movement resemble an animal. Ihnatowicz set out to create a sculpture that would move by reacting to the presence of people in its surroundings, the changes in movement controlled by a computer program. In creating Senster, Ihnatowicz enriched the genre of kinetic sculptures of the 20th century with the then contemporary achievements of cybernetics and robotics and also drew on experiments from the field of artificial intelligence.
In 1970, it was exhibited at the Evoluon in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, but was then believed lost for many years. Notwithstanding its unknown whereabouts, this groundbreaking endeavor was regarded as a pioneering example of media art and continued to inspire many artists and researchers.

Reactivated and carefully stored by researchers at AGH University of Science and Technology, Senster is highly fragile and cannot leave its new permanent location except for special events. Its public premiere took place at the WRO Media Art Biennale 2019 in Poland and this appearance at SIAF2020 marks its first showing in Asia.

AGH University of Science and Technology　Established 1919
During the 20th century, the university’s research gradually expanded to encompass electronic engineering, robotics, and computer sciences. The Faculty of Humanities, where the Re:Senster project originated, is the youngest in the AGH academic community.

Senster

History of Senster

1968
After presenting pieces at the famous “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibition in London, Edward Ihnatowicz started work on a large kinetic sculpture, Senster, within the framework of an experimental art program sponsored by Phillips.
1969
A quarter-scale model of the sculpture was made. Ihnatowicz moved to University College London laboratories to prepare a final version with the help of the academic community.
June 1970
The piece was shipped to the Netherlands to be installed at the Evoluon in Eindhoven, Philips’ newly opened science-technology exhibition hall.
1974
Senster was dismantled and its remains collected by Piet Verbourgh, an electric engineer and entrepreneur collaborating with Phillips. Its subsequent whereabouts were unknown.
2014
The Re:Senster group of researchers and designers was formed at the AGH University, after the sculpture was found by one of its members on a satellite image in Colijnsplaat, the Netherlands.
2017
Re:Senster team brought the piece to Krakow, Poland, where reconstruction/reactivation work was started.
October 2018
The reactivated Senster was installed at the AGH University laboratory.
2019
Senster was shown to the general public for the first time during the WRO Media Art Biennale 2019 in Poland.
2020
Senster is shown for the first time outside of Poland, making its Asia premiere at SIAF2020.

Cod.Act

André Décosterd
Born 1967 in Le Locle, Switzerland
Lives and works in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland

Michel Décosterd
Born in 1969 in Le Locle, Switzerland
Lives and works in La Chaux-de-Fonds

Founded 1997 by the Décosterd brothers

André Décosterd pursued an apprenticeship in organ making in Switzerland. He graduated from the Ecole de Jazz et de Musique Actuelle in Lausanne in 1995. As a musician and composer, he has specialized in computer programming for musical applications and studies composition systems specific to electroacoustic and contemporary music, in particular algorithmic composition.

Michel Décosterd obtained a diploma of architecture from the Engineering School of Biel in Switzerland. A plastic artist, his practice started with photography and he then built kinetic devices that produce moving images from light and translucent material. He later left the field of the moving image and acquired more competence in materials science and mechanics. He creates kinetic sculptures alongside research into the plastic arts, in particular the machine and movement.


codact.ch

πTon2017

This sound installation comprises a giant rubber tube that responds to artificially created human voices, undulating and contorting almost like some kind of living creature. The complex mesh of sound and form poses questions to the viewer about the nature of the organic and artificial.

Seiko Mikami

In 1984, she began to create large-scale installations exploring the information society and human body. Based in New York in 1992-2000, she has worked mainly in Europe and the USA, showing interactive works with a focus on visual interfaces. Her installations are often controlled by eyesight, by hearing or internal physical sounds, or by a three-dimensional haptic perception or have dealt with perception of gravity as the sixth sense. She exhibited widely at art museums and media art festivals both at home and abroad. She also taught at the Tama University. She died in 2015.

Desire of Codes2010

This is a large-scale interactive installation consisting of three parts. The viewer is surveilled and filmed by robotic arms and the many devices attached to the walls of the venue. This footage is shown on a screen, intermixed with online images from surveillance cameras in public places around the world, which together conjure up a portrait of a new reality.

Julian Charrière

Born 1987 in Morges, Switzerland
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Charrière’s work bridges the realms of environmental science and cultural history. Through varied media – spanning across performance, sculpture, photography and video work, the projects often stem from fieldwork in remote locations with specific geophysical identities such as volcanoes, icefields, and radioactive sites. To date, his oeuvre has explored postromantic constructions of “nature,” staging tensions between deep or geological timescales and those relating to mankind. Charrière’s approach further reflects upon the mythos of the quest and its objects in a globalized age. Deploying seemingly perennial imagery to contemporary ends, his interventions at the borderline of mysticism and the material encapsulate our fraught relations with place today. His works have been exhibited at museums and facilities around the world, including the 57th Venice Biennale (2017, Italy).

julian-charriere.net

Towards No Earthly Pole2019

Set in glacial regions, the video work Towards No Earthly Pole creates a narrative about rarely experienced but widely imagined environment. Human activity etches changes even on areas so remote they seem the most otherworldly places on earth. Filmed by drones, these landscapes enveloped by the darkness of night appear to occupy somewhere between reality and phantasm.　The exhibit will be a large-scale audiovisual installation in the Glass Pyramid’s 600m² snow storage unit.

Tohru Nakazaki

Born 1976 in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan
Lives and works in Ibaraki

He completed a doctoral degree at the Musashino Art University Graduate School of Art and Design. His wide-ranging, multimedia practice encompasses performance, video, and installation. In particular employing the motif of signboards, he spurs defined forms in favor of loose and intuitive approaches exploring the dissonance within words, images, and other commonalities His exhibition credits are numerous. In late 2006, he formed the group Nadegata Instant Party as another aspect of his practice. At the end of 2007, he established Playroom (Tohru Nakazaki + Mizuki Endo). From 2011, he has also been in charge of the art direction for Project FUKUSHIMA!

tohru51.exblog.jp

SNOW PLAYROOM2018

Try making a place to ski at Moerenuma Park during the festival. This is the aim with which I started. It is an attempt to visualize part of the way in which snow is an inseparable part of people’s winter lives in Sapporo. In consultation with various people, I hope I can make a strange sort of place, somewhere that attracts new ideas and mysterious curiosity—somewhere we perhaps cannot even call a ski slope. (Tohru Nakazaki)

Atsuko Mochida

Born 1989 in Tokyo, Japan
Lives and works in Tokyo

She completed postgraduate studies with a major in intermedia art at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2018. The same year, she completed an MFA in public art and new artistic strategies at Bauhaus University, Weimar. From 2018 to 2019, she carried out research in Germany and Singapore on a grant from the Pola Art Foundation. Her practice focuses on blurring the line between the public and the private by transforming the quality or meaning of space and inserting temporary or highly foreign-seeming elements such as walls or stairs into existing spaces and buildings.

atsukomochida.jp

A Floating House2019

The artist plans to create an outdoor installation at Moerenuma Park.

Suzanne Treister

Born 1958 in London, UK
Lives and works in London and the French Pyrenees
Treister was a pioneer in the new media field from the beginning of the 1990s and has worked simultaneously across video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing, and watercolor. In 1988, she was making work about video games; in 1992, virtual reality; in 1993, software; and in 1995, she made her first web project and invented a time-travelling avatar, the subject of an interactive CD-ROM. Treister has evolved a large number of projects, many spanning several years, which engage with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems, and the potential futures of humanity.

www.suzannetreister.net

The Holographic Universe Theory Of Art History (THUTOAH)2018

This work investigates the holographic principle and the holographic universe theory, an idea first suggested in the 1990s, where all the information, which makes up our 3D ‘reality’ (plus time) is contained in a 2D surface on its boundaries. Treister’s work hypothesizes that, beyond art historical contexts and imperatives, artists may have also been unconsciously attempting to describe the holographic nature of reality

Carolin Liebl and Nikolas Schmid-Pfähler

Carolin Liebl
Born 1989 in Lichtenfels, Germany
Lives and works in Offenbach am Main, Germany

Nikolas Schmid-Pfähler
Born 1987 in Gießen, Germany
Lives and works in Offenbach am Main

Carolin Liebl and Nikolas Schmid-Pfähler have been working as an artist duo since 2012. Both graduated from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach in 2017. In 2018, the duo realized their third solo exhibition, “WIR|ES,” at the CADORO – Centre for Arts and Science in Mainz. In 2019, Liebl and Schmid-Pfähler, together with nine other artists, opened a joint studio. It is available for artists of various genres, serving as a platform for the exchange of practices. Incorporating elements of sculpture, installation, kinetics and robotics. the pair’s work deals with the effects of technological develdopment on the aesthetic and social aspects of human and nonhuman life. Their medium—technology—is both a carrier of social convention and a pictorial material. Their objects expressing different energies examine the nature of electrical energy and the self-perception of humankind in relation to it.

www.radiate.fish

Vincent and Emily2018

Two robots—the titular Vincent and Emily—are equipped with optical sensors but are never able to distinguish each other’s signals from those of the environment The unpredictable interplays and interactions between the two robots have a certain analogy to human behavior patterns.

Arinori Ichihara

Born 1910 in Tokushima Prefecture, Japan
Died 2010

He relocated to the village of Makkari in Hokkaido in 1913, moving to Otaru after graduating elementary school. He began painting with oils shortly before his 41st birthday, subsequently taking inspiration from the paints leftover on a lithograph stone used instead of a palette, and starting to work with monotyping. His entry to an open-call art exhibition in Tokyo was noticed by Teiichi Hijikata, an art critic and director of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, and from the 1960s he participated in many print exhibitions at home and abroad. From his intaglio prints whose plates he damaged with tools and then allowed to degrade naturally, to his sculptural works that combined printing with both natural and artificial objects, he continued to extend the boundaries of printing through his vigorous spirit of experimentation. He also left his mark as a haiku poet and mountaineer in Hokkaido. He died in 2010. The following year, the Ichihara Arinori Memorial Hall opened in the Otaru City Museum of Art.

SON･ZON1960-1979

Arinori Ichihara created his monotypes by a process of scraping off the ink uniformly applied to lithographs or metal plates, and then printed with a press. In this immense act of working by hand on hard plates, and in the transfer, resides a sense of contingency and unconsciousness, evincing a world of abstract images that transcends even the intent of the artist.

Nissho Kanda

Born 1937 in Tokyo. Died 1970.

In 1945, his family was one of those evacuated to northern Japan by the national government from urban areas hit by air raids during World War II. He moved to the town of Shikaoi in Hokkaido and was engaged in developing farmland in the area. Encouraged by his older brother, Kazuaki, he started to paint with oils when he was attending junior high school in Shikaoi. He then took over the running of the farm after graduating junior high. Alongside his regular occupation, he continued to paint and enter his work into prefectural and national competitions. His painting style developed from an early period, when he faithfully depicted the farm horses, cows, and workers around him in monochrome based on detailed observations, to vividly colored interiors, expressionist group portraits, and finally a return to realism before his untimely death at the age of 32 in 1970. In 1978, a retrospective exhibition at the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art greatly increased awareness and recognition of his art. In 1993, the Kanda Nissho Memorial Hall (today, the Kanda Nissho Memorial Museum of Art) opened in Shikaoi.

Interior 1970

Interior is the final work that Nissho Kanda exhibited in his lifetime and a major painting from his later period. The elements in the painting—newspaper pages covering the flat walls and floor, a man facing forward, and a clutter of various articles—shows both the development and continuation of the still lifes and interiors the artist had been painting from a few years prior. Though its faithful portrayal and textured expression is realistic enough to seem tactile, the painting conveys less of a sense that its subject occupies somewhere in an actual space. Based on his own life and physique, the artist was searching for the possibilities of human expression in figurative painting by investing the work with reality through a naturalistic depiction while simultaneously aiming to strip that away.

Takuro Goto

Born 1982 in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan
Lives and works in Yamagata

He studied painting at Tohoku University of Art and Design. His practice encompasses landscape paintings portraying abandoned buildings and villages in Yamagata, the prefecture in which he is based, as well as abstract paintings of figures striking poses from classical Greek sculpture in front of the remnants of modern civil engineering and industry. His work portrays the conditions at the frontline of places where nature, formerly under the control of humankind, is encroaching on and recapturing territory from the contemporary Japanese, who imitate the West despite their radically different physique. Through this work, he closely examines the appearance of his native land, not as nostalgia or something exotic or utopian, but rather as a place at the whim of and forced to change by economic decline and political policy, and in this way he searches for the ideal form of local landscape painting today.

www.takurogoto.com

Once prosperous and well developed as Japan’s largest coal-mining district, decades on from the closure of the mines in Sorachi there is not a soul to be seen in the vast tracts of housing blocks where the miners used to live, while what remains of the abandoned coal mine is left exposed to wind and snow, covered in plants, rusting, and slowly being reclaimed by Mother Nature. We live today, thrown right into the midst of this ultramodern landscape that seems to symbolize the current state of Japan. (Takuro Goto)

Hideki Ozuchi

Born 1981 in Chiba Prefecture, Japan
Lives and works in Yamagata Prefecture

His practice deals with hollowed-out inner cities as well as the mines or vanished and abandoned villages of the Tohoku region of Northeast Japan, documenting acts of intervention in these environments and nature where such changes were imposed. The phenomena arising from these acts are expressed through video, photography, and performance. His recent work has explored the theme of deification, interpreting ways of coexisting with nature as living side by side with gods.

www.zuchimekko.com

On our planet, we can find many examples of places that were once the locations of human activity or the cycle of capital as well as numerous locations that subsequently fell into an undifferentiated state due to the immense interventions of Mother Nature. Such places offer a glimpse into both the power of nature and the development of human technology, and also vividly remind us that we are alive. Based on his interpretation of ways of coexisting with nature as the act of living side by side with gods, Hideki Ozuchi will intervene into a place through various deity-like poses.

Satoru Aoyama

Born 1973 in Tokyo
Lives and works in Tokyo

He graduated from Goldsmiths College, University of London with a BA in textiles in 1998. He then completed an MFA in fiber and material study from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001. Employing industrial-level sewing machines, his practice expands the frame of the embroidery medium by questioning the values inherent in humanity and labor that have continued to change since modernization. In 2018, he launched a series of art lectures and workshops in partnership with Yoichi Takebayashi and Ryosuke Hara.

satoru-aoyama.com

Good Morning Tokyo2005

Good Morning Tokyo was made by Satoru Aoyama in 2005, when he returned to Japan at the age of 31 after spending many years living in the UK. The “Homesick Series” was the name he subsequently gave to the sequence of landscapes he made at this time, which emphasized a certain lyricism and the manual nature of humanity through expressing the dusk sky with machine embroidery.

Ryosuke Hara

Born 1975 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan
Lives and works in Kanagawa

Painter. He graduated with a degree in painting from Tama Art University in 2000, where he also completed postgraduate studies in 2002. He won the top prize at the open-call competition Tokyo Wonder Wall in 2001. From 2013 to 2017, he was a part-time lecturer in painting at Tama Art University. In 2018, he launched a series of art lectures and workshops in partnership with Satoru Aoyama and Yoichi Takebayashi. The theme of his works is turning humans and nature into two-dimentions.

ryosukehara.com

sprout drawing 2006

Hara selected this work he made when he was 31 years old. It is a piece he exhibited at the solo show that was his debut at a commercial gallery in 2006. It is also the first work of his that entered a public collection. Drawn like graffiti on the linen material on the reverse of a picture that went wrong, the work was a starting point for his practice as an artist.

Kotaro Migishi

Born 1903 in Sapporo, Japan
Died 1934

After graduating from junior high school, he moved to Tokyo with the aim of becoming a painter. While working at a number of jobs to make ends meet, he continued to hone his craft and was accepted into the first Shunyo Art Exhibition in 1923. His style progressed from naïve art to the Sodosha group of Ryusei Kishida and then to Orientalism, before the experience of seeing a Western circus in Shanghai on a trip to China in 1926 inspired him to start a series on the theme of clowns. In 1930, he participated in the founding of the Dokuritsu Exhibition, almost immediately then shifting to an avant-garde style employing scratches, geometrically abstract imagery, and surrealist paintings with motifs of butterflies and shells. He died suddenly on a trip to Nagoya in 1934.

Flying Butterfly 1934

Flying Butterfly is a major example of Kotaro Migishi’s work from his surrealist period. Of the six butterflies pinned to a white wall, one in the top right has broken free of its pin and is about to take flight. This fantastical image also appears in the artist’s poem “Butterflies and Shells (Visual Poem),” where he eulogized this act of flying away as symbolizing freedom.

Przemysław Jasielski

Born 1970 in Poznan, Poland
Lives and works in Poznan

His practice combines art with science and technology by creating interactive installations, objects, drawings, and photographs. Based on precise planning and scientific research, his work focuses on critical and conceptual content. The resulting output is frequently experimental and asks uncomfortable questions. Many of these works deal with everyday customs, freeing the viewer from the wisdom and imagination formed by living in this age. By changing the way in which we perceive the actual world, the viewer is able to observe it in new and fresh ways. His work often involves actions commonly regarded as impossible, useless, or ineffective, and usually contain a certain kind of critical sense of humour.

www.jasielski.com

Global Warming Control Unit 2010

This project will create a site-specific work based on research into the historical heritage of the Shiryokan, which was originally the Sapporo Court of Appeals. The interactive work will involve a device through which viewers can check the legal consequences of their actions.

Rainer Prohaska

Born 1966 in Austria
Lives and works in Vienna
His practice focuses on everyday phenomena and objects, which he comically inserts into artistic contexts. Since 2002, he has been working on projects that engage with issues of ecology and sustainability through art. In addition to art projects on and in connection with the Danube, he has realized exhibitions and projects in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Moscow, and for MOCAK in Krakow (Poland), the MAK Center in Los Angeles, the Luminato Festival in Toronto, Transformer Station in Cleveland, and the Albertina in Vienna.

www.rainer-prohaska.net

Unplugger2002–2019

Sustainable social and ecological behavior that engages actively in the development of the living and survival conditions of humankind in our society are today upheld as global goals. A laboratory of artistic research to create a sustainable society, FUTURAMA LAB will make an installation that straddles several spaces and deals with international issues. Exploring the titular concept, the installation is based on such concepts as an “artistic office,” an “education camp,” and a “classic exhibition.”

Satoshi Murakami

Born 1988 in Tokyo
Lives and works in Tokyo

He graduated from Musashino Art University’s Department of Architecture in 2011. In 2014, he began the “Living Migration” project in which he resides in a self-made Styrofoam house. His work seeks ways to invert introspection and convert it into social action. His publications include Living with My Small Mobile House (Fukuinkan Shoten, 2019) and Days with My Small Mobile House (Seki Shobo, 2017). He stayed in Örebro, Sweden, in 2017 on a grant from the Agency for Cultural Affairs Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists.

satoshimurakami.net

The photograph shows a study model for Advertising Signboard House, the work that Satoshi Murakami will make for the festival. The artist will put a room inside this signboard, where, using funds from the festival and sponsors as well as the power of soil, snow and signage, he will live during SIAF2020 while advertising the festival.

Klaus Pobitzer

Born 1971 in Silandro, South Tyrol, Italy
Lives and works in Vienna

Pobitzer creates drawings, installations and performances that fully engage with viewers, particularly in public spaces. Using photographs shot by himself or taken from the mass media sources for his computer drawings, the artist critically addresses the consumption frenzy inundating society as well as political propaganda, mass communication, and the media themselves.

This work, in which historical figures and internationally noted persons intermingle with Sapporo locals, suggesting their interrelatedness, depicts a world where past and present, global development and regional impact are all connected by communication technology even while separated by geography or culture.