Introduction
Ten years have passed since ICC Open Space (Hereafter referred to as simply Open Space) first opened in 2006. While it at first was entitled to generally reflect activities centered on the ICC with long term exhibits which were changed on a yearly basis, after 2012 the exhibit portion developed into the main axis of it as the “Open Space exhibition,” and so it remains. It consistently hosts art exhibits, related events, and serves as an archive to give exposure to and foster an understanding of the current media environment.
In those ten years, thanks to cooperation of participants including many artists, we’ve been able to introduce many works and activities. These activities with a single theme have gone on continuously for ten years, developing into ten exhibitions. When you look back over that history, you can see, beginning with the works of media art from that period, a general view of the changes in how the contemporary media technology environment is expressed. I think perhaps it can form a document of one of the currents in such trends.
In this essay, I hope to show the state of the ICC before and after Open Space began, as well as the changes in trends for Open Space over the last ten years.
The Origin and Formation of Open Space
With 2005 marking a juncture for the ICC, Open Space was conceived for a renewal opening which was carried out in 2006.
From its opening in 1997 until 2000, the ICC maintained permanent exhibition in its collection. However, from 2001 to 2005, it ceased exhibiting the collection in favor of focusing on activities based around curated special exhibitions. That is to say, the style of exhibition become where every displayed art works gets changed in the ICC. To that extent, they enlarged the exhibition area in order to allow for the mounting of large scale exhibits. But, on the other hand, as this forced us to closely reexamine the ICC’s function as being only a facility for the display of works, we reconsidered and discussed what the ICC’s central function should be. And so, in order to introduce artworks, including ICC’s activities as well as media art that connect science and technology with art culture to broader audience, and to make public access to the exhibition and the ICC facility free of charge all year round, Open Space was established as the ICC’s main activity. Open Space set out to become “open” institution, and as the entry point of ICC, it tried to expand the function of permanent exhibition seeking to display its concept not by exhibition but by activities.
Open Space was, at first, organized into four exhibit zone and corners (See ‘Configuration of ICC Open Space’). Currently, while they’re not precisely denoted zones, we carry on having the “Open Space exhibition,” a research and development corner, the HIVE browsing corner, and an area for viewing the media art chronology.
To display permanent installations inside the building, originally for a work by MIKAMI Seiko from the ICC collection, we built the Anechoic Room. After MIKAMI’s installation, we opened the chamber to the public simply to experience an “echo-free” environment, but since 2008 it’s been used to display works which can only be realized in that special environment, by requesting artists to use it to create exclusive works which couldn’t be implemented in any other facility than ICC.
Additionally, Open Space holds such artist development program as “emergencies!” to introduce new artists.
In the Open Space exhibition, exhibits are switched out on an annual basis, with consideration given to the characteristic trends and currents at the time of planning. We mainly focus on works
of art that plainly express the theme of the current media environment, aiming to be organized to capture the ICC’s activities in media art from a historical perspective since 1997, or possibly even before that.
In addition, we have also organized exhibits that are focused on particular subject. For instance, there was “Mission G: Sensing the Earth” which was developed as a small-scale exhibit in 2009, there was “The Archaeology of Art and Media Technology” in 2010 where displayed work was associated with a column, and then there was the themed exhibit titled “50 years of Art and Communications Technology” in 2011, consisting of texts and archive video.
Another special characteristic of the Open Space exhibition is how all exhibits are long-term. Just as the maintenance and repair of works of media art is a current ongoing point of discussion in art museums foreign and domestic, one of the reasons why it’s difficult for museums to have an opportunity to exhibit or to collect is that there are the considerable problems related to their upkeep. This is particularly meaningful in light of the established methods of preservation at average art museums to maintain works for long term exhibition. In addition, doing so demands a technical staff for the maintenance of operating works of art.
Trends in Media Art From the ICC’s Opening and Since 2006
The establishment of the ICC was closely tied to trends in the social multimedia environment in the 90’s. “Media art” being mainly an outgrowth of government and corporations in the 90’s should be proof of that. Before long, the ICC’s activities were begun in line with world trends, along with similar media art centers at the time, like Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria and ZKM (The Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe) in Germany, giving acknowledgment to the field of art expression related to science, technology, and media society. In 1997, the same year that the ICC opened, a video festival in Berlin renamed itself Transmediale, while in Japan the “Japan Media Arts Festival” was inaugurated.
From that time through the ten years leading to the start of Open Space in 2006, from the historic works of media art of the 90’s (like those of Christa SOMMERER and Laurent MIGNONNEAU), the use of technology became more widespread. When the works of each various period are placed side by side, you can think about how science, interactivity, devices, the internet, and games formed the background technology which produced them.
On the other hand, the goal of the Open Space exhibition is to seek to make the works displayed there easy to understand and to provide an acquaintanceship with them. It’s important that the themes of the works and the relationship to the technology used to make them be clearly understood, and so works with components that made for a smooth introduction tended to be the ones mostly selected.
From the mid-2000’s till 2010, roughly the first five years of Open Space, it’s become accepted that media art expressions have become more popularized, with the spread of the Internet and the permeation of media art forming the background for it.
Within such a trends, the works of FUJIHATA Masaki have striking meaning as media art. Capturing the essential point of view of technology, his works give impetus to think about new technology in a more primordial way. Additionally, by modifying existing technology through hacking and bending techniques, you can see a sort of independent attitude of seizing what’s provided back to yourself.
Besides that, the growth of social networking services and spread of mobile handheld devices like smartphones since 2010 have been connected to changes in these works of art, and with the entertainment realm of games and such having taken on the name of “Media Geijutsu,” the field of media art has surpassed and widened its domain for expression, which could characterize the current trend.
The term “Media Geijutsu” commands even greater public attention now than it did in around 2009. With the media art genre now expanding to include entertainment items like video games, as well as manga and anime, it has caused a sort of chaos to reign among those concerned with the boundaries of media art, demanding a reaffirmation to the question of “Just what is media art?” Furthermore, with the issue of the deadlocked “National Media Arts Center,” it’s still fresh in our minds that it became the opportunity to reconsider what media art is.
Not just with Open Space, the range of activities of the ICC has not only specifically covered the realm of media art. It has now taken a much broader view, including engineering, design, and even web contents classified as entertainment as what could be called “Media Geijutsu.”
Since 2011, it’s focused on blazing trails into new fields of artistic endeavor, beginning with digital fabrication and speculative design that have become characteristic traits of recent years, along with space technology like satellites used for the creation of media for works of art, bio-art which seeks to connect life sciences with art expressions, and interactive design, which connects the digital with the physical.
Along with that in recent years, it’s been mounting exhibits with a more historic perspective. Beginning by re-exhibiting works from the 90’s by such artists as NAKAZAWA Hideki and HACHIYA Kazuhiko, in 2014 it exhibited the reproduction of“The Legible City” (1989–91), a work from the dawn of media art by Jeffrey SHAW under the Digital Art Conservation Project led by ZKM, introducing methodologies for the repair and rebuilding of media art works in order to preserve them.
