THE NURSERY- SPUTNIKO
This was part of an ongoing series of articles that was released digitally throughout July 2022. They were first published in the print edition of the Bright Moments Quarterly that was distributed in July in London.
Malte: Throughout your artistic career, you have been an acute observer of internet culture, highlighting first its progressive potential and then increasingly its darker sides. How do you situate the emergence of blockchain technologies and NFTs in the evolution of the internet?
Sputniko: Ever since I was a student, I have been working closely with technology. I studied Computer Science and Mathematics and I have continued this interest in my work as an artist. In fact, I have been us- ing computers and the internet since I was ten years old – which is, of course, not early today, but it was very early for my generation! Being born in 1985, I was a very early adopter, if you like. Later on, when social media became more popular, I began post- ing my work on Twitter and Youtube. This is how my work became first known by curators around the world. So, I did experience the “good” side of social media, but I was suspicious of the idealized story that social media would connect people.
Technologies have their dark side. With social media, we really see this emerging in terms of hate speech and divisionism. With web3, I can see the utopian vision, but I also have the feeling that this entire world has a more sinister, more dystopian side to it. It could actually be worse than what web2 brought us, but I am just beginning to imagine and explore what it will look like. In general, however, I think that one should always be aware of the darker side of these technologies.
What would you imagine the darker side to be? Is the potential tokenization of everything something that worries you?
Yes, that certainly makes me uneasy. Being an artist who is always looking for ways to fund my work, I have to say that web3 offers unprecedented opportunities for that. So, it certainly opens new possibilities for creatives who have to find ways to fund their works. But I also see this other side. Everything is tokenized. Everything is visualized: the floor price, the buying and selling, everything. It almost feels like it turns your artwork into a stock: an item that you simply buy or sell for profit.
Someone showed me an app with all the NFTs that are bought and sold in real time. There was no representation of the NFTs, just numbers. And at that point, there is no love for the artist or the work there anymore. This dynamic taps into some very fundamental human desires. The temptation of money and wealth is immense for some people. Despite the fact that web3 opens up a lot for artists, I am worried about this side. This is also why I really appreciate the approach of Bright Moments. Doing physical exhibitions is not a way to get rich quick because it is a model that does not lend itself to blitz scaling. But it gives artists the freedom to experiment.
This leads me directly to the next question. You have worked across a variety of media. Does the fact that the artwork is stored and sold as a NFT influence your artistic practice?
Certainly, it influences me in many ways. For Bright Moments in London, I am creating 100 pieces that are ‘born’ on the exhibition opening and then gradually evolve with time, taking on different shapes. The entire work is inspired by my pregnancy and the recent birth of my daughter. Seeing my daughter grow made me wonder: how could I translate the experience of this process into an artwork? NFTs allow you to incorporate this temporal aspect into the work. The collector has a piece that evolves over time and lets them experience this process of growth and shape-shifting. Matt Kane did something similar with Gazers, which is a fascinating time-based work.
Prior to NFTs, interactive art could do something like this but it was very complicated to maintain: you’d have to sell a device and take care that it is running properly. With NFTs, however, you can guarantee that the artwork is always maintained in the way you want it to – at least as long as that blockchain is alive. As a media artist, being able to create very complex data and time-based works that can simply live on the blockchain is very exciting. And for the collectors, it is also reassuring to buy these art pieces as NFTs, because it solves the question of maintenance.
NFTs also brought together a supportive community of people who are genuinely interested in my work. In fact, the NFT space has a culture of rewarding experimental work and to support experiments in technology. My friend Emi Kusano, for instance, funded a female-led anime production in this way.
How did you enter the NFT space?
Actually, the friend I just mentioned, Emi Kusano, brought me into the NFT world. With her encouragement, I did my first auction through the Japanese platform Startrail and sold a video work for $65,000. Then the collector @karatekid_xyz contacted me and also collected my signature work Menstruation Machine - Takashi’s Take for 50Eth on Foundation. Another Japanese collector bought another edition of Moonwalk Machine - Selena for 25Eth. In this regard, NFTs have changed a lot for me. Especially since I was already well-known in Japan, the availability of my work as NFTs quickly led to an interest among collectors.
Your exhibition at the Bright Moments gallery in London creates an intimate and immersive space for the audience. Could you elaborate on the experience you wish to create with this installation?
The NFT series consists of 100 pieces that are inspired by the experience of giving birth to my daughter. At first, the NFTs are like a flower bud. Gradually, over the course of one year, the NFT begins to grow and evolve, changing their color and texture, as they morph through different shapes. All of the NFTs will be unique; they will have in- dividual color hues and so on. The project is titled The Nursery as each of the holders will take home a ‘child NFT’. In many ways, these time-based NFTs are the opposite of a stock-like token: they are indexed to this gradual process of organic growth. In developing them, I asked Misaki Nakano to help me with the visual programming and color animations, because I personally wanted to work with a female engineer with whom I could talk about the experience of giving birth. And the developer Sho Hihara is helping me with the blockchain integration.
In the installation, I want to explore some- thing very experiential. The installation will be primarily fabric-based. The animations will be projected onto fabric and the interior space of the installation will be built through asymmetric fabric as well. Viewers will be able to access the space to see the NFTs grow. The sound in the space will be ambient, emulating a heartbeat. The feeling I would like to evoke in the viewer is that they are inside something like a womb, a space where they can see the growth and birth of the artworks. I would also like to mention that I prepared the entire installation in Tokyo with the company PICS, with whom I have been working for a long time.
Do you think that the opportunity to exhibit NFTs in physical galleries will become more important in the years to come?
Yes, it certainly will. The NFT space is moving very fast at the moment. But culture is not like that. The fact that something is seen a lot or sells well does not equate to artistic quality. Building culture is a very slow pro- cess. And while I have already spoken about the problematic aspects of the existing art system, museums and curators play an important role in contextualizing artworks and giving visibility to groundbreaking artists that are not necessarily successful on a market level. Curation can provide a fresh perspective on works and history, especially those that are experimental in nature.
The web3 world, I imagine, would benefit from a more curatorial approach to exhibitions in both virtual and physical spaces. Bright Moments is already doing great work in this regard – by encouraging artists to explore the possibilities of exhibiting digital works in physical space. If NFTs are exhibited in physical space, it also becomes easier to bring it into a dialogue with contemporary art. Culture has always worked like this: things build slowly on top of each other and interlink. You cannot build culture fast!
What are the formative moments in your development as an artist?
I am half-Japanese, half-British. Partly growing up in Japan, I was acutely aware of gender inequality, which became an important theme in my work. The other main theme of my work is technology, and specifically the way technology changes our lives. There are very few women involved in tech, and this applies to crypto and NFTs as well. This is something I always find frustrating, because, as a tech person, I can really see how these domains shape our lives. Because it is so impactful, having little diversity in these fields is dangerous – and I am not only talking about gender diversity, but also racial and cultural diversity. So, I would say that introducing diversity into technology has always been a motivation for my work.
In terms of artistic influence, the performance artist Laurie Anderson was very important for me, because of the way she deals with technology, gender, and politics in her work. She was my idol growing up. I was also inspired by the movement of “Riot Girls” in the US and directors like Sofia Coppola and Miranda July. When I studied at the Royal College of Art in London later, my teachers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby were crucial. They are known for the approach of “Speculative Design”: a form of design that asks questions and explores different possible trajectories. All of these influences led me to work such as Menstruation Machine, which was exhibited at MoMA and is probably my most well-known work. I designed a machine that simulates the process of menstruation for those who don’t experience it to highlight the degree to which this experience is still obfuscated and shamed.
Your work brings together science, technology and art in fascinating ways. Could you say more about how you think about this constellation, which is a comparatively rare one in contemporary art?
Science and technology have always fascinated me and been part of my artistic practice. For my work The Red Silk of Fate, for instance, I developed a new fabric in collaboration with scientists working on genetic engineering. We created this red silk fabric that contains a socially bonding love hormone Oxytocin. The title of the work refers to The Red String of Fate, a very famous mythology in Asia. According to this myth, two people who are destined to meet each other are tied together through an invisible string bound by the gods.
What I wanted to highlight with this work is that we live in an age where an artist’s imagination can actually realize myths. The marvels that myths have always ascribed to the power of gods can now be turned into reality. It is a controversial issue, to be sure. But the act of designing organisms is becoming more and more normalized. I wanted to create a new bio-mythology in the time of bioengineering, to highlight the possibilities at our hands. We are living in a time where science and technology can do what was once imagined in myths.
What role does art play in imagining and shaping the future in this way, especially the future of technology?
The role of artists and designers is to imagine future scenarios. We are making proposals of possible futures. When we do this, it is important that we not only show utopian visions of the future, but also explore dystopian scenarios. As I mentioned before, the group of people working in technology is not very diverse. If artists and designers explore different visions of the future, it can help to make the imagination of the future more expansive and inclusive. In that sense, it can help to open a dialogue on how we want our collective future to be like.
