Daito Manabe (Rhizomatiks)
Bio
Artist, programmer, and DJ. Launched Rhizomatiks in 2006. Specially-appointed professor at Keio University SFC. Manabe's works, which range into a variety of fields, takes a new approach to everyday materials and phenomena. However, his end goal is not simply rich, high-definition realism by recognizing and recombining these familiar elemental building blocks. Rather, his practice is informed by careful observation to discover and elucidate the essential potentialities inherent to the human body, data, programming, computers, and other phenomena, thus probing the interrelationships and boundaries delineating the analog and digital, real and virtual.
About the talk: Cultivate the new realm and make the world more exciting
We founded Rhizomatiks co.,ltd. in 2006 with this mission and passion. Through interactive arts, Rhizomatiks has explored new forms of information visualization and new ways of communication between humans, or with machines, which led us to deliver a number of projects from the early days even before when the knowledge developed by media arts rarely were adapted into the fields of general services, products, or entertainment yet. Expanding the scope through many projects and collaborations, the company established three divisions: 'Research', 'Architecture' and 'Design' as a celebration of its 10th anniversary on July 25th, 2016. The aim was to apply creation that began in museums, live events, and advertising to infrastructure and platforms inside the society, such as commercial spaces and urban development. Now it is the year 2020, and the world is undergoing the transformation led by data and computation. Infrastructure is being developed, more activities, which used to be restricted to specific environments, and being brought out into the public space. Over this shift of time, we are receiving many requests for larger-scale projects than ever before from society and industry, while there are more and more opportunities to advance the achievement of our challenging projects that have been built up in the field of arts and advertising. Rhizomatiks co.,ltd. will change its name to Abstract Engine co.,ltd. at the end of January 2021. The division 'Rhizomatiks Research' focuses on the new possibilities of technologies and expression, with the main emphasis on projects of a high degree of R&D and experiments. We will change its name to 'Rhizomatiks' to present cutting-edge projects through R&D projects, creation, and collaboration with other artists and researchers.