NAOKO TOSA

Naoko Tosa, a Japanese artist, has been influenced by several important artistic movements of the 20th century such as surrealism and pop as well as the art and technology movement that began in New York and at the MIT CAVS in Boston in the 1960s -1980s.

The concept of my artwork is to express the relationship between different media such as voices/sounds and images as artworks.

I was influenced by Nam Jun Paik and worked in video art since my twenties, and one of my early video artwork became a MoMA collection. After finding that excellent artworks were created using the latest technology of that era, such as the Pyramid in Egypt and the big Buddha statue in Nara, I moved on to the engineering path to learn and develop new art creation technologies. Currently, I am making artworks based on the system I have developed.

I believe that behind the creation of each artwork there should be the relation between the artwork and the cultural context. Therefore, my artworks are a fusion of art, Japanese culture, and technology.

In order to realize such artistic activities, I establish my own lab at universities and research institutes, promote collaboration with students, researchers and people from other genres including those from other countries, and send my message as artworks to the world.

As overseas activities from the following year, I plan to create artworks based on jumping up paints, called “Sound of Ikebana,” using newborn voices of babies in collaboration with an obstetrician and gynecologist.

After that, with the cooperation of JAXA, I am planning to carry out a project to make Sound of Ikebana by using the newborn baby’s voice in a zero gravity space generated by parabolic flight.