Perceptual-responsive environments: sense and sensibility in Japanese media artist Seiko Mikami's installations

Abstract

In Japan, the interwoven systems of communication, transport, and information and the commercially-industrially-culturally compressed spaces of the metropoles, like Tokyo, have created super-density as new cultural form of the present. In this respect, the installation works by Seiko Mikami respond to quotidian experience with high density and lack of individual space. In her interactive installations, we are targeted by programmed multisensors and robotic devices, which invite us to engage in close encounter with the measuring and moving tools of the installation. In this human-machine-interrelationship, which is set out for multiple participants, we will also achieve a sense of each other via technology. The technological environment becomes a perceptual space, which instigates awareness and self-awareness of our own.Yvonne Spielmann (Ph.D., Dr. habil.) is presently Research Professor and Chair of New Media at The University of the West of Scotland. Her work focuses on interrelationships between media and culture, technology, art, science and communication, and in particular on Western/European and non-Western/South-East Asian interaction. Milestones of publish research output are four-authored monographs and about 90 single authored articles. Her book, “Video, the Reflexive Medium” (published by MIT Press 2008, Japanese edition by Sangen-sha Press 2011) was rewarded the 2009 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics. Her most recent book “Hybrid Cultures” was published in German by Suhrkamp Press in 2010, English edition from MIT Press in 2012. Spielmann's work has been published in German and English and has been translated into French, Polish, Croatian, Swedish, Japanese, and Korean. She holds the 2011 Swedish Prize for Swedish-German scientific co-operation.