Digital arts and realities «An inspiration rather than a clear message»

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Ryoichi Kurokawa is a transformative and performing artist. For this Japanese artist whose work celebrates the meeting of art and science, reality is seen through the filter of digital technologies, which he uses to deliver visceral images and vertiginous emotions. In his complex work Kurokawa transforms analogical and fragmentary matter of reality while playing with the audience’s persistence of vision, visual memory or hallucinations made possible by the contiguous stream of digital effects colliding in a single stunning work. 

With subassemblies, presented for this 2021 edition of Multiplica, Ryoichi Kurokawa offers a physically intense and graphically powerful audiovisual performance, with an environmental theme that will inevitably appeal to modern sensitivities.

subassemblies is a powerful and unsettling audiovisual performance that explores humanity’s relationship with nature. What are the origins of the project? How did you come up with the idea for it?

I often use elements of nature as motives since one of my main creative axes is the reproduction of natural phenomena, such as laws of physics and biology. I have been drawn to abandoned buildings for a long time on various levels and the original idea was to use these structures to contrast with nature.

subassemblies is a very powerful experience. Are you trying to manipulate the audience’s mind with this work? Do you want to make them ​“physically” feel that the path we have taken as a species is wrong? How do you want the audience to feel during the performance?

I don’t intend to manipulate the audience’s mind, it can be freely interpreted in different ways. I want to provide inspiration rather than deliver a specific message or information. I don’t want to lead by verbalising, except with a audiovisual language. I’m trying to let viewers think through experience or to provide a trigger or awakening.

May I ask if you think being a Japanese-born artist has influenced your vision of nature and your concern about the environment? 

I obviously have a particular Japanese conception of nature and attitude towards the environment as has anyone whose identity is influenced by his or her national culture. Nature is mystic, beautiful and frightening at the same time. In our country we simultaneously receive benefits and threats from nature. Creatively speaking I never intend to incorporate it consciously into my artworks but it definitely affects my view.

Interview by Maxence Grugier