Daito Manabe + Kamitani Lab: Dissonant Imaginary Live Av
September 22
Nave 16. Matadero
Multidisciplinary Japanese artist Daito Manabe, one of the most influential and acclaimed digital creators worldwide, headlines Nave 16’s session on Thursday 22 with a collaborative project created together with Kamitami Lab. Under the title Dissonant Imaginary, this live AV performance explores the effect of music on the brain through a system that analyzes brain activity and interprets it to shape it into images, generating the visual elements of the show itself.
The project focuses on investigating how changing from a specific sound to abstract music provokes different mental images. Using data obtained from MRI scans of real subjects and decoding technologies applied to different areas of the visual cortex, the artists are able to predict these images and recreate them on the big screen, literally materializing our imagination.
Daito Manabe
Artist, creative programmer, composer and DJ, Daito Manabe bases his work on careful observation to discover and elucidate the essential potentialities inherent to the human body, data, programming, computers and other phenomena, blurring the boundaries between analog and digital, real and virtual. Throughout his extensive career, he has collaborated with a long list of prominent artists such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Björk or Squarepusher, but also with relevant scientific institutions such as the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics in Manchester or the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. Among the numerous awards he has received for his multidisciplinary contributions, we find the Ars Electronica Distinction Award, Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity Titanium Grand Prix, D&AD Black Pencil, or the Japan Media Arts Festival Grand Prize.
Yukiyasu Kamitani
Professor at Graduate School of Informatics at Kyoto University, Kamitani received his B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of Tokyo, and a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology. He continued his research in cognitive and computational neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Princeton University. He is a leading pioneer in the field of “brain decoding”, having been named a Research Leader in Neural Imaging in the 2005 “Scientific American 50,” and receiving many awards throughout his career, including the Tsukahara Memorial Award (2013), JSPS Prize (2014) and Osaka Science Prize (2015).
