Artist Statement

Interactive installation

In her latest project, Seiko Mikami addresses the relationship between human and machine agents. A matrix of sensors, mini spotlights and surveillance cameras is arranged across the
space and follows the movements of visitors. Every movement a viewer makes sets off a response from a whole swarm of small surveillance units, each using their stepper motors to find the right position for pointing at the body present in the room. An uneasy dialogue may evolve in which the visitor looks for strategies to either confuse the machine sensing system, or become completely invisible by standing still.
There are three parts to this work; the first and second part are being shown in the TRUST exhibition. The first part, Wriggling Wall Units consists of 180 devices distributed across a wall. As soon as a visitor enters the area in front of the wall, the devices’ heads start blinking. They move in the direction of the visitor in synch like an insect’s tentacles. Highly sensitive cameras and microphones able to detect motion and sound beyond human perception record the visitors’ actions and send the recorded images and sounds to an integrated database. From there they are transmitted to Compound Eye Detector Screen.
Compound Eye Detector Screen is the second part of the work, and this image is like facets of an insect’s compound eye; countless hexagonal parts make up one large screen. Accumulated
visual data in the database from wall cameras, as well as data collected by surveillance cameras installed in public spaces around the globe, are projected onto the single facets that form this screen. Detailed real-time images of visitors’ skin, eyes and hair are projected onto the screen facets where they are mixed with pre-recorded footage of other people and with surveillance
images recorded at public places such as airports, parks, hallways and crowded streets from around the world. The accumulating compound eye can be considered a device that illustrates
the automatic generation of desire, (data) based on information collected in contemporary information/surveillance society.

Programming Compound Eye Detector Screen: Norimichi Hirakawa
Hardware Wriggling Wall: TAKEGAHARASEKKEI
Curator (YCAM): Kazunao Abe
Co-developed with YCAM InterLab
Technical direction: Soichiro Mihara & Richi Owaki
Sound programming: Satoshi Ham

• Seiko Mikami is an artist living and working in Tokyo. She has been showing large-scale installations themed on information society and the human body since the 1980’s. Since
  the nineties most of her works have been interactive media art installations incorporating human perception, such as the eye tracking project Molecular Informatics at Canon ARTLAB, the acoustic sense and inner body sound project in ICC’s permanent collection, and gravicells, on the theme of the gravity, ‘the sixth sense,’ at YCAM. Her works have been  exhibited at many galleries in Europe and the USA, including the Miro Museum in Spain, Musée des Beaux Arts de Nantes, and Kulturhuset in Sweden. She has also exhibited work at media art festivals around the world – DEAF in Rotterdam, transmediale in Berlin, the SHARE FESTIVAL, Italy, Ars Electronica Linz, MoisMulti, Quebec, the Digital Culture Festival, UK, and many others. Mikami is currently Professor of Media Art at Tama Art University. Tokyo, Japan.

Full text (PDF) p. 70-75

Desire of Code was commissioned by YCAM /Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media.