This year, the sixtieth since the end of World War II, provides many occasions for reflecting upon our history. During the postwar years, Japan has successfully rebuilt its economy largely through policies emphasizing the development of new technologies; the result is the material abundance we enjoy today. During those years, progress in science and technology also directly benefited the lives of people in general. The excitement of trying out new imaging and audio media and of successfully connecting - whether by radio or over the Internet - never palls. Even before the rise of computers, those tools we take for granted today, a host of artists had been keenly interested in technology and in using it as a means of expression. That desire arose from more than curiosity about the new and the satisfactions of consumption; it was driven by the joy of rediscovering the familiar world, of seeing time and space in new and lively ways.
This exhibition both offers a retrospective of those artists' many and varied experiments using technology and presents recent work in this vein by Japanese artists. The exhibition thus offers a valuable opportunity to engage in an interdisciplinary review of postwar art, spanning imaging, sound, and other domains, and to examine the many trends, from industry to the counterculture, that have contributed to the directions in which the artists of today are moving into the future.
