Atau Tanaka

Mostly known for his collaborative piece with artist Kasper Topelitz, Global String, 2000, Atau Tanaka is bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. Atau creates sensor-based musical instruments for performance, and is known for his work with biosignal interfaces. He seeks to harness collective musical creativity in mobile environments, seeking out the continued place of the artist in democratized digital forms.

Global String, is a networked music installation which I comprised of two sites, each with a steel cable 15 meters long that stretches diagonally from floor to ceiling through the installation space. The cables are connected to a real-time sound-synthesis server sending data to the internet. Conceived as a worldwide musical communication piece, it allows participants form different locations to collaborate by plucking or pulling strings. Sound data is then streamed to each site and video projections provide a visual connection among the users. This piece opens my mind into the realm of collaboration once more and is an amazing example of how collaboration can happen digitally as well as in a physical space.

I am most interested in Tanaka’s piece Bondage; the piece was conducted using a software that has immense depth in its capabilities the program is called metasynth and I have been dabbling with it off and on for the better part of a year now. It is nice to see a piece that uses this technology for its physicality and Tanaka’s piece shows me opportunity for creating sculptural works with the material created within the space of Metasynth. Bondage, is a piece about enigma drawing on mystery and fantasy. It is digital in nature, but analog on the surface. The artist uses wood and paper as a vehicle for digital image and sound projecting a Japanese woman in a kimono onto a sliding paper shoji screen. The sounds are sine-waves, but not in a typical ultra-clean design space. The viewer’s presence completes the loop, uncovering parts of Nobuyoshi Araki’s original photograph, scanned left to right in frequency bands producing sound. The quadraphonic sound system is oriented vertically in the plane of the paper screen. The fibers of the paper give an organic surface for the digital pixels. The result is a total environment, a concentrated space where sound meets image, but where interaction is not pushed to the fore. Instead, he attempts to create a magical space, drawing upon the voyeuristic fantasies of the viewer.

Atau Tanaka. Web. 08 May 2011. .

Wands, Bruce. Art of the Digital Age. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Print.