Keiichi Tanaka’s video installation Luminous Cosmic Rays was a part of the Festival’s guest artists exhibition, held at the lounge. The piece, made using high-technology tools, is a follow-up to the work he showed at the 21st International Biennial of São Paulo.
In Luminous Cosmic Rays, the artist used Geiger counters to capture cosmic rays and radiation from the Earth and elsewhere, which are converted into light beams, laser rays and sound effects, creating a constantly changing, unique configuration with each new moment.
artists
Works
Curator's text 1996
Simple and unknown sensations
Keiichi Tanaka’s work frequently inspires classification as futuristic or techno, which is comprehensible. His pieces are, without a doubt, meticulously planned works of engineering which use geiger counters, lasers, neon lights, computers, samplers, and electronic components, all of which are identified with advanced technology. Tanaka, as well, looks for elements that although constantly present in everyday life seem inaccessible to mere mortals. And finally, the terminology used in his work inspires identification with the distant worlds of a scientist’s imagination.
But soon it’s possible to conclude that this collection of futuristic and technological elements has as its aim to capture pure and spontaneous manifestations that exist in nature and permit them to provoke simple sensations and feelings, same of which have been sleeping and ignored in our subconscious. Tanaka works with light, nature and time, using a “scientific“ creativity to explore and investigate these elements. Tanaka has come to 11th Videobrasil to exhibit his Luminous Cosmic Rays – a sequence of what he presented at the São Paulo Biennal in 1991. He uses geiger counters to capture cosmic rays and radiation produced in space or on earth which he feels are a part of the universe, or galaxies manifestations - as for example, the solar winds. The impulses captured by his geiger counter are transformed into light beams, laser rays and sound effects, creating a dynamic ever-changing, unique whole - generating a complicity between the observer, the artist, nature and the specific moment, and turning each element into a participant of the composition. “My work tries to capture time, which is constantly passing. My intention is to remember the existence of sense besides the organic ones.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "11º Videobrasil: Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica": de 12 a 17 de novembro de 1996, São Paulo-SP, 1996.