Mika Tajima: Æther

Mika Tajima: Æther is organized in collaboration with the New Museum, New York, and curated by Margot Norton.

Pranayama E (2017) is part of a series of wooden sculptures modeled after orthotic devices and punctured with chromed hot tub jets.

Installed on a large wall, Force Touch (Manu Dextra Sinistra, Horizontal) (2018) presents a configuration of gold-chromed Jacuzzi jets, which emit forced air and bring viewers into contact with an invisible pressure.

Social Chair (2016) continues Tajima’s ongoing investigation of the ways built environments can manipulate and control human activity. This piece is based on a particular modular design by Yves Béhar for Herman Miller, titled “Public Office,” which aims to transform corporate environments into places for collaboration. The piece references intentional casualizations of the working environment, where it meshes with every aspect of life, from waiting rooms and lounges, to transit stations and cafes.

Tajima’s Negative Entropy series (2012—ongoing) are textile paintings, which interpret acoustic data into abstract compositions. These woven acoustic portraits of different sites of production are made on a Jacquard loom, a machine created in 1804 that industrialized the process of manufacturing textiles with the use of punch cards to transmit data, and an invention that many historians consider an important step in the development of computer and machine programming.

A hanging light installation comprised of networked LED lights, Meridian (Istanbul) (2018) responds in real time to aggregate and quantified human sentiment scraped from social media. The shifting color of the lights responds in real time to the collective mood of the city of Istanbul, which is evaluated by a computer linguistics program, which analyzes live textual data taken from Twitter feeds, and then processed through an algorithm developed to translate data into light color.