Hiroshi Kawano. The Philosopher at the Computer An exhibition at ZKM | Media Museum, Project space
September 24, 2011–January 08, 2012 Opening: Fr, September 23, 2011, 6 p.m The Japanese philosopher Hiroshi Kawano (*1925) belongs to the pioneers in the conquest of computer technology for the arts. The ZKM is now dedicating a first retrospective to his work. The exhibition comprises numerous works and documents which have never before been presented outside Japan, and draws on the rich Hiroshi Kawano Archive located at the ZKM since 2010. The retrospective emphasizes Kawano's special role in the circle of pioneers of »computer art«: he was neither artist, who discovered the computer as a new means of production and theme, nor engineer who came to art via the new machine, but a philosopher, who left his desk for the computer center to explore the logic of artistic creation through the experimental generation of pictures, poetry, sculptures and music. As early as September 1964, Kawano published the first Designs he had calculated with the aid of the OKITAC 5090A computer at the University of Tokyo in the Japanese IBM Review. The young philosopher, who was teaching aesthetics at the Metropolitan College of Air Technology at the time, arrived at the information processing machine, the computer, by way of his critical investigations with neo-Kantianism, symbolism, semiotics and, finally, information theory and information aesthetics. Hiroshi Kawano's decision to give his archive to the ZKM was, in part, thanks to a German philosopher who gave him the decisive impulse to bring together aesthetics and computer technology, namely, Max Bense who taught in Stuttgart. A German-English book with contributions by Hiroshi Kawano, Yoshiyuki Abe, Jungkwon Chin, Simone Gristwood, Akemi Ishijima, Jungyeon Ma and Margit Rosen will be published in conjunction with the exhibition. The publication is made possible by the kind support of the Japan Foundation. Curator: Margit Rosen ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe | Lorenzstraße 19 | D-76135 Karlsruhe | Germany | www.zkm.de _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
