New Humans II was a piece showcased during Mika Tajima’s solo exhibition entitled “Spectral” at Taro Nasu gallery in Tokyo.
From Taro Nasu (text by Howie Chen):
Mika Tajima’s exhibition titled Spectral features sculptures and paintings that visualize transitional, contingent states of being to evoke a world in which entities and organisms body forth into the realm of perception.
At the center of this exhibition is a sculpture titled “New Humans II”. Emergent gatherings of synthetic humans rise from the liquid surface of a black monolith. Appearing to morph like a supernatural life form, these dynamic clusters of magnetic ferrofluid liquid produced by machine learning processes are images of communities of synthesized people modeled from actual DNA, fitness, and dating profile data sets sourced from public and leaked caches. The algorithm identifies affinities amongst these new human profiles and visualizes contingent communities forming and dissolving without convergence.
Brooklyn Research worked with Mika Tajima on developing all the electrical hardware, embedded software, and updates to the previous code base. Mechanical engineering by Mathias Wagner, initial algorithm designed by Jacob Lee.
All Photos by Yasushi Ichikawa and Charles Benton.
All Video by Tomomi Takano