Ars Electronica 2020

『YOICHI OCHIAI × JAPAN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA VOL.3』
A series of performances to update the orchestra experience using sensing and other technologies, directed by Yoichi Ochiai and Japan Philharmonic Orchestra. The "Sound Free Concert" (Tokyo Opera City), in which audiences with and without hearing impairments can enjoy an orchestra, will present a new way of listening to and experiencing music that moves back and forth between sight and hearing. “Crossing Un-Orchestra"(Tokyo Metropolitan Theater) will create an opportunity to listen to music with synesthesia through the intersection of digital and analog, Japanese and Western, and auditory and visual.

『Reminiscence of the Unknown,
Image and Matter || Digitally Natural, Naturally Digital || Sehnsucht nach Masse』
A virtual gallery tour of Yoichi Ochiai's exhibition held in 2020 Summer, Shibuya, Tokyo. The theme of the solo exhibition, entitled "Reminiscence of the Unknown", is a fascination with mass for the sake of the concept of the mediation of images and materials, computers and nature, and the mediation of the massive and the immaterial. The butterfly motif used throughout the exhibition is a symbol of materialization: the transformation of material things, from classic platinum prints to lithographic prints with thin film interference, displays with ultrasonic controlled reflective luster, and a contemporary take on 19th century projection equipment. Through some of his interpretive works, he questions what massiveness means that cannot be translated into data and evokes the longing we feel for nature and landscape.

『YOICHI OCHIAI × JAPAN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA VOL.3』
More than 90 years after the introduction of the orchestra to Japan, its mannerisms have not changed much, but in an age when the human senses can be expanded through the control of various devices, sensors, light and visuals, how can classical music be delivered to various people? The series continues to challenge the expansion. I hope to see this continues to make various attempts.

『Reminiscence of the Unknown,
Image and Matter || Digitally Natural, Naturally Digital || Sehnsucht nach Masse』
This work is a documentation of Ochiai’s the exhibition filled with his confrontation with nature and his deep spirit of inquiry makes us reflect on the time when the relationship between nature and the human being must be reconstructed, so-called Anthropocene, and the many lives that we are forced to recognize through the Covid-19. Through works that are not used by technology, but rather expressed through coexistence and resonance, it makes us ponder a future that has no answers.