Waft Lab is a Surabaya-based interdisciplinary initiative whose art, culture, science, and technology practices are driven by a DIY spirit. Since 2011, Waft Lab has been organizing various activities such as workshops, discussions, exhibitions, and festivals with the aim of discovering fresh ideas and building sustainable collective networks. Waft Lab previously had four main regular programs: Elektro Work for electronic music performances; Video Work for video festivals; Urban Work for art exhibition events; and No Work for workshops or sharing and discussion activities. More recently, Waft Lab has focused on its No Work projects, continuing to develop and seek new methods that can meet the needs of the public.

Born in 1984, yang02 completed a master’s degree majoring in media art at Tama Art University in 2009. His work is inspired by the potential for expression in the public sphere with a foundation in digital media. His practice inquiries into the independence of expression and reveals human physicality by entrusting the agency of actions to autonomous devices or external factors. His recent group exhibitions include the 20th DOMANI: “The Art of Tomorrow” (The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2018) and “The Breathing of Maps” (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM], 2018). He won the Excellence Award in the Art Division at the 21st Japan Media Arts Festival (2018).

Gyaru-den is an electronics art group formed in September 2016 by Mao, a college student and self-professed gyaru, and Kyoko, a former pole dancer. Its practice fuses electronics with the gyaru youth subculture that was one of Japan’s signature female street fashion trends in the 1990s and 2000s. Inspired by the idea that even gyaru can create things with electronics, the group proposes a unique concept of technology for gyaru, by gyaru. Its output includes such original items as dekotora-cap (hats decorated with electronic components) and “devices that you want to encounter so much it makes you shake.” The pair continues to explore a creative combination of gyaru fashion and technology that can attract guys at nightclubs and parties. Mao and Kyoko’s dream is that electronics and gyaru fashion will become so widespread and intermixed that one day you can even buy Arduino kits at the discount store Don Quijote.