The Rock the Future exhibition is currently showing some very tempting Japanese digital art.

In one room, painted in huge black-and-white stripes, is exonemo’s Shikakunomukou (On the Other Side of Vision). Visitors are invited to use one of the 3 computers with stylus and draw a picture or write something but as soon as you apply pressure the lights go out and a loud and strange noise is blasted from the loudspeakers. The combination of striped walls, lights going on and off and weird noise assail the senses whilst you are trying to draw.

The drawings are then relayed to video screens on a rota programmed by the artists. In the other room the last strokes that you made are being displayed on the 3 large screens. Each screen shows the last few minutes worth of drawings floating around and changing size and shape.

In extra! by Ryota Kuwakubo, a printer spews out white till receipts from the ceiling. But rather than printing numbers, it prints snippets of news headlines, taken from news websites (via RSS feeds). Visitors are encouraged to take the papers away with them or tear them up, leave them on the floor or collect and throw them into the air.

The idea came from a story from the Edo period (1603 – 1867) when the working class were protesting about poverty and the hierarchy. Then a piece of card containing a religious message fell from the sky. The person who found it disregarded its instruction and died. Now we are all swamped with “horizontal” information from the net, the TV and radio. Kuwakubo is attempting to make it vertical again by dropping the same information from above on slips of paper. Detached from their original contexts, the headlines combine with others as abstract fragments of information, It is left up to the individual viewer to decide how to interpret it.

In another room, ‘ikisyon 15’ by ressentiment consists of objects collected from local people. The room is white with a large round lamp in the middle. Amongst the objects are placed rotating cameras and microphones recording the objects and the movement and sounds of the visitors. In the other half of the gallery, visitors can watch the film of the items in the room. The voices of the people has been distorted and the images are manipulated, as some are overlaid with others. These representations are suggested to intimate ‘monitored society’.

The installations are currently exhibited at FACT, Liverpool until October 30.

See also the always interesting Art in Liverpool, fogless and Independent.
Images by Brian Slater and exonemo.

Thanks Konomi for the tip!