By gathering “emerging” artists of the next generations in one place, ACOUSTICLUB aims to produce diverse chemical reactions and creative interactions among the artists.
Firstly, what is the characteristics of this young and emerging generation in the world of visual arts? Our generation is the so-called “digital-native” generation. The internet has been widely used during our formative years, and we have grown up with it. We have thought there is “everything” within the Internet. However, we have also been taught from our parents and teachers about the dangers of the Internet, the uncertainty of the accuracy of the information brought by anonymous Internet users behind their screens, and the importance of “real-life” interactions.

From that, it can be said that our generation has two contradicting views on the Internet; that there is “everything” in the Internet, and also at the same time, there is “nothing” there.

In the Japanese media art world, there are artists, such as Akihiko Taniguchi and Issei Yamagata, known as the “display-faction”. In the age of post-internet, many media artists are exploring new mediums for their works. While we see many works using mediums of the VR and AR – which has a high affinity with the internet in terms of “virtual space” – in Japan, we see that many artists focus on using the display screen as their main medium. These works exists, as one might put it, as a backlash towards the internet, in which there is no graspable reality there. The artists inherits the philosophy of the “mono-ha” (a name for artists mainly in

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Japan in the mid 20​-Century, who explored the industrial and material use of everyday

objects), and the audience of those works can reinterpret the world view by projecting the ungraspable, virtual world onto a physical and graspable display screen.

Our generation of artists, in fact, utilizes many display screens in our works. However, as I have seen numbers of works, I have noticed that the works were not created in the narrative of the “display-faction”. The video itself is the true nature and the essence of the work, and the display screen is merely the means of simply projecting the work into the real world. It even seems as if these works can exist simply uploaded and publicly released on the internet. In fact, a question of “Is it not smarter to just upload it on the internet, than to intervene through many mediums, such as a display screen, to exhibit it?” lingers.

There, the topic of “generation” that we have discussed above has rerisen. We use the internet every day, and many of the works that we know have been discovered on the internet. It is because “there is everything on the internet”. But as mentioned, our generation also holds this polar opposite value that “there is nothing on the internet”. Namely, it can be concluded that we might have a strong tenacity to have our works exist in the physical and graspable world.

To exhibit a work in the physical and graspable world using hardware technology, even if the work itself can exist in the virtual world like the internet… This sense of unbalance-ness might be one of the characteristics of the artist of our generation.

This exhibition is a collection of works that symbolize this generation.