Tokyo Data Collective

Organic, rhizomatic and involved: the Swiss artist collective Tokyo Data crosses electronic and acoustic, archival and computer generated images, installations and screens where the experimental pushes digital applications to their limits. Rather than playing on two-dimensional flatness, Tokyo Data offers immersion that is sometimes participative, sometimes interactive or performative. The man machine – but not only that: avoiding the short-sighted Manicheanism of analogue to digital, the group provides a multi-faceted reflection on technology and on information with an express interest in “cognitive saturation”, working with sound and images hand in hand. Transdisciplinary in nature, the artist collective assembles strengths scattered in four corners of Europe: visual artists, motion designers, art directors, sound designers and plastic artists immersed in a complex process of multiple resonances where specialisation tends to fade in favour of a highly contemporary artistic outburst. The Japanese reference indicates technological climax just as much as a worrisome loss of control. Loss of connections, disorientation, loss of earnings. Japan as a sage mixture of vintage, import and complexity, with all the fantasies her gigantic capital evokes. The future is already here – now. and yet typewriters are still around, the old cathode ray tubes have never been too far. In line with post-digitalism, the new generation of artists have already forgotten the previous generations’ Manichean questioning and seems to draw on the best of major artists such as Pierre Huygues, Carsten Nicolai or the late Harun Farocki. Like a current artistic fringe not far from ethnography, Laure Prouvost in mind, Tokyo Data gathers together memories and machines and creates multiple narratives using archive footage, generative elements or music. Hot and cold, silicon and metal, the irrational and the binary.