MIKAMI Seiko is an artist whose works engage the various information environments that the human body occupies. The nervous system, viruses, information wars, and membranes have figured largely in her works. The approach of her recent works has shifted: while earlier works were installations that articulated meaning and value through physical forms and were accessible to the sense of touch, her more recent works emphasize changes in the programs themselves (algorithms) by interfacing them with visible forms (perception). Here, virtual reality does not exist as something that copies the "real world," but rather, it becomes clear that the real world can only be taken up by means of the virtual. In this case, "virtual" implies the act of interfacing perceptible images and forms with cause-and-effect and chance (unpredictable possibilities) relations, thereby setting the human body's perceptions into motion. One could say that it is this programming itself that constitutes media art for MIKAMI.

Her works have analyzed how each part of the human body acts as a site for the interface of the relation between the human body and information. Two of her recent projects thematize the human body: the first uses the molecular structures contained within the body to express the body, the second underscores the role played by "membranes" that exist outside the human body. Representative works of the first group are <<Molecular Clinic>> and <<Molecular Informatics>> completed at ARTLAB, Canon in 1995-96. In <<Molecular Clinic 1.0>>, which was presented only on the Internet, an undetermined number of users manipulated the algorithmic factors of the program to set off a series of changes in the construction of the form and space of the work as a whole. This is an example of a work of art constructed through the relationality of information exchange. In << Molecular Informatics>> the exhibition visitor used a pair of VR glasses with an eye tracking sensor to view a molecularly composed virtual world. Movements produced by the sense of sight, which represents a fragment of the human body, were algorithmically processed as information in a virtual three-dimensional space. Oriented by the locus of the gaze, molecular chains were instantly generated and processed in real time. This was an attempt to express how the world comes to be composed and altered by changes in information inaccessible to the eye.

These two works differ from MIKAMI's previous works, which have engaged information as a metaphor through material representations; the novelty in these more recent works is her approach of presenting information itself. Themes from << Molecular Informatics>>continue to develop in << World Membrane>> a piece that shows how various dimensions such as the body, national borders, and the air co-exist to create a world of "membranes," layers that mutually fold and implicate each other. In << Borderless Under the Skin>> (1992), MIKAMI addresses the topic of contagious diseases. The exhibition visitor's pulse is transmitted from his/her finger in the form of an L.E.D. signal to make visible the simulation of the progress of a contagious disease. MIKAMI's work for ICC, << World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body>>, uses the acoustic sense as a framework to express how the world is constructed as a membrane. Formerly, MIKAMI presented an exhibit set in a germ-free room. The exhibition visitor, who was made to wear protective clothing, experienced the feeling of his/her body entering another dimension, yet found himself/herself unable to perceive this new reality to which his/her body was being subjected. In << World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body>> MIKAMI uses the anechoic room--a space where the sounds produced are alienated from the visitor's senses of acoustic and visual perception--to produce a "perception driven architecture" via the amplification and transformation of the body's internal sounds.