Categories
Events News Programs

Yale CCAM Presents the Ultra Space Symposium: Arakawa + Gins on April 27-28, 2023

The Reversible Destiny Foundation is happy to announce and to participate in the upcoming interdisciplinary symposium at Yale University’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) focusing on the work and philosophy of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. The event is free and open to the public. Please find more information below.

To register, please visit: https://yaleultra.space

New Haven, Connecticut—The Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) at Yale, located at 149 York Street, presents the Ultra Space Symposium: Arakawa + Gins on Thursday, April 27 and Friday, April 28.

The symposium looks back to the work of Arakawa (Shusaku Arakawa; 1936-2010) and Madeline Gins (1941-2014). The pioneering artists were driven by the idea that architecture could extend human life, a concept they called “reversible destiny.” Inspired by their work, the Ultra Space Symposium will explore the relationship between design and the human body, in contexts from live performance to visual art and sound design.

The symposium will open with a screening of Ultra Space: Terra Cosma, a short documentary film produced by CCAM, as well as “What Do You See?: An Interdisciplinary Look at a Work by Arakawa and Gins.” This panel will bring together speakers including Miwako Tezuka and ST Luk from the Arakawa and Gins-founded Reversible Destiny Foundation, and Yale faculty members including Professor of Astronomy and Physics Priya Nataranjan, Assistant Professor of Architecture Mae-Ling Lokko, and Professor in the Practice of Sound Design Matthew Suttor.

The Ultra Space Symposium: Arakawa + Gins will also feature the premieres of Latency, a new performance created by Liam Bellman-Sharpe, and Composition in Frozen Time by Yale Professor of Music Konrad Kaczmarek. The panel “Body/Cyborg/Alien: Embodying What’s Out There” will feature Ravi Kumar Kopparapu of NASA, EM, SS. Experimental workshops such as “Manipulations,” led by CCAM Director Dana Karwas, Yale School of Art Critic Sarah Oppenheimer, and CCAM Postgraduate Fellow Alvin Ashiatey, will invite unique engagement with the symposium’s themes. During the closing discussion, “Living In Space,” audiences will hear from Ariel Ekblaw, Director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, and bionic pop artist Viktoria Modesta.

An interdisciplinary exhibition will accompany the symposium, which will feature works by Arakawa and Gins, an installation of short films, and the immersive VR experience Echoes of Silence by the Emmy Award-winning artist Tamara Shogaolu.

For the full program and to register for free tickets, please visit: https://yaleultra.space

The Ultra Space Symposium is part of CCAM’s Ultra Space research initiative, which is led by CCAM Director Dana Karwas.

The Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) activates creative research and practice across disciplines to advance the cultural landscape of our time. We initiate and support work that adopts and investigates approaches from the arts, architecture, engineering, the sciences, and more. We regularly present our discoveries to the public in dialogue and partnership with the university, New Haven, and the world.

Top image: Graphic design by Alvin Ashiatey

Categories
front page Recent Exhibitions

STILL ALIVE – Aichi Triennale 2022

STILL ALIVE  Aichi Triennale 2022

Aichi Arts Center , Nagoya City, Japan

July 30 – October 10, 2022

 

We are pleased to announce that Arakawa and Madeline Gins will be participating in the Aichi Triennale 2022 “STILL ALIVE”.

For more information, visit https://aichitriennale.jp/en/

Categories
AG conferences Events front page News

“AGxKANSAI 2022” Arakawa and Gins International Conference

We are happy to announce the international conference AGxKANSAI 2022: Art and Philosophy in the 22nd Century After ARAKAWA+GINS, organized jointly by the Studies of the Architectural Body Research Group at Kansai University and Kyoto University of the Arts. The event will take place on March 11–15, 2022 at Kyoto University of the Arts with a combination of in-person and virtual presentations and a live broadcast of all sessions available online. Registration is now open through the conference website!

AGxKANSAI 2022: Art and Philosophy in the 22nd Century After ARAKAWA+GINS
Date: March 11–15, 2022
Venue: Kyoto University of the Arts, Kyoto, Japan (on-site and online)
Website: https://www2.kansai-u.ac.jp/agx2022/

Building on the issues and themes explored at previous Arakawa and Gins conferences (AG1: University of Paris X, 2005; AG2: University of Pennsylvania/Slought Foundation, 2008: and AG3 Online/Columbia University/Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2010), AGxKANSAI 2022 will explore the shape of art and philosophy toward/in the 22nd century through lectures, dialogues, presentations, exhibitions, and performances. “After ARAKAWA+GINS” signifies our desire to follow after their future-forward vision even after their untimely demise.

The conference opens on March 11th with a conversation between Takashi Ikegami and Yasuo Kobayashi, followed in the afternoon by a virtual tour of the exhibition, the first on-site paper session, a conversation between Hideo Kawamoto and Naohiko Mimura, and an online lecture by Adrienne Hart. From March 12th, various programs will take place including round-tables, research presentations, and workshops by Arakawa and Gins researchers from Japan and abroad. A reproduced version of Arakawa’s early installation work Bottomless I (SOCIOUS),1963, will be on view in conjunction with the event.

Please do not forget to register in advance

Bottom image: Arakawa, Bottomless I (SOCIOUS), 1963,
acrylic panel, cloth, mirror, steel, steel mesh, steel wire, string, and thread, 41 x 100 x 100 in.

Categories
front page News

Children Who Won’t Die, Arakawa / WE, Madeline Gins

Reversible Destiny Foundation is pleased to announce that the International edition of the Documentary Films Childen Who Won’t Die and We, directed by Nobu Yamaoka, is now available for purchase online

The two documentary films explore in depth the life and works of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, including interviews with the artists, their friends, professionals from various disciplines as well as the residents of Arakawa+Gins’s architectural works.

For purchase information: https://www.architectural-body.com

 

Film 1: Children Who Won’t Die, ARAKAWA
Language: Japanese / Subtitle: English, Japanese
Running Time: 80mins

Can a house help us not to die? Artists/scientists/revolutionaries Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa declared that our lives need not end, and created dwellings whose purpose is to reverse our destiny and defy death itself.
The Reversible Destiny Lofts in Tokyo, with their vivid colors, undulating floors, irregular lines, and spherical rooms were the culmination of their research and speculation. Arakawa said, “Living here, human beings will never die, as the potential ability of their bodies can be maximally developed.” This film includes interviews with residents of the Reversible Destiny Lofts and an astrophysicist, as well as growth records of children who were raised in these remarkable buildings. Children Who Won’t Die proudly sings a celebration of life, highlighting the possibilities of a world no one could ever have imagined before.

Cast:
Shusaku Arakawa
Haruo Saji
Yuma Yamaoka
Sono Yamaoka
Residents of Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka

Director: Nobu Yamaoka
Music: Keiichiro Shibuya
Narrator: Tadanobu Asano

 

Film 2: WE, Madeline Gins
Language: English / Subtitle: Japanese
Running time: 60 mins

How does the body meet the future? Madeline Gins – poet, architect, visionary – talks about the origin of creation, its secrets, and the future of humanity. This film documents a visit with her to her studio and to the Bioscleave House in East Hampton, NY  – the only example in the USA of the revolutionary, death-defying architecture she developed with Shusaku Arakawa. Gins describes her first encounter with Arakawa, and sheds light on his representative works, including his classic series of artworks, Mechanism of Meaning, which served as the foundation for the procedural architecture projects they later created together. The film also shows visitors navigating in, reacting to, and being transformed by the peculiarities and wonders of the space of Bioscleave House.

Cast:
Madeline Gins
Shusaku Arakawa
Lucas Poole
Sofiane Poole
Gillian Poole
Hubert Poole

Director: Nobu Yamaoka

 

For more information please visit: https://www.architectural-body.com

Categories
Recent Exhibitions

[Move Semantics]: Rules of Unfolding

We are happy to announce the participation of Arakawa + Gins / Reversible Destiny Foundation in the exhibition [Move Semantics]: Rules of Unfolding at the EFA Project Space, a program of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. This project is facilitated by Elæ Moss and Jeff Kasper and will be on view from March 27 – May 1, 2021 by appointment. The virtual opening and walkthrough of the exhibition is on Wednesday, March 31 @ 7:30 PM EST. Please register from the link below (yellow highlighted) and also see further information about this show and about many related virtual programs.
 

March 27-May 1, 2021

Wednesday – Saturday 12 pm – 6:00 pm by appointment.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION


[MS]:RU asks: “what are the BRIGHT FUTURES for the intersectional body?” Furthermore, how must our practices, our institutions, our networks, our spaces, and our infrastructures radically change in order to survive, live together, communicate, and plant (or provide) the seeds to ensure a future beyond the Capitalocene?


On Wednesday, April 21 @ 7:30 PM EST, RDF’s Projects Manager ST Luk will participate in conversation with architect Martin Byrne – “Re/orientation Roundtables Week 4: Sites Chat: Working in and through the built environment, in and beyond the Capitalocene.” ST Luk has worked closely with Madeline Gins during her last project Biotopological Scale-Juggling Escalator (2013) at the Dover Street Market in NYC. Please join and learn about Arakawa + Gins’s philosophy of architectural body and reversible destiny and how it continues to influence and inspire today’s artists, architects, designers, and many creators from across the fields.

Categories
front page News Research

Arakawa and Madeline Gins in the 22nd Century: The Body and the Experience in the Reversible Destiny Mode

Reversible Destiny Foundation is pleased to announce the new publication Arakawa and Madeline Gins in the 22nd Century: The Body and the Experience in the Reversible Destiny Mode

This book explores the philosophy of Arakawa and Madeline Gins who set out to fight the human destiny of mortality. Ten years after the death of Arakawa (1936–2010) and six years after the death of Madeline Gins (1941–2014), this significant collection of texts rediscovers Arakawa and Gins’s thought, which still continues to inspire and thereby remains in progress.


“Humans don’t die”

Arakawa and Madeline Gins made many unforgettable statements on life and death, and created spaces such as the “Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka—In Memory of Helen Keller” and the “Site of Reversible Destiny—Yoro Park”, which rattle our senses and perceptions. In our time of uncertainty, their philosophy paves the way for many discoveries, inspirations, and a heightened awareness and concern for the body. 

How did Arakawa and Gins try to overcome the contradiction between not dying and human mortality? This publication provides opportunities to rethink, from multiple perspectives including body theory, philosophy, architecture, art, psychology, education, etc., the philosophical and architectural practices of Arakawa and Gins, not only in retrospect but also as being still in progress. In addition, it introduces recent Arakawa and Gins-related exhibitions, performances, and other projects. 

 

Editors: Mimura, Naohiko and Kadobayashi, Takeshi.

Paperback: 315 pages

Publisher: Film Art, Tokyo, 2019

Language: Japanese

ISBN-10: 4845919176

ISBN-13: 978-4845919178

 

The book is available for purchase on www.amazon.co.jp

Categories
Recent Exhibitions

life and limbs

Opening Reception: September 24, 6-8PM

Location: 38 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10003

 

life and limbs is the fourth exhibition in Swiss Institute’s Architecture and Design Series, curated by Austrian artist Anna-Sophie Berger. Considering corporeality as a primary concern for design, Berger here assembles a group of works that register the body as a habitat that can be imaginatively stretched, altered, modified, adorned, replicated or destroyed. Including works from a variety of disciplines, movements and periods,

The exhibition includes works by Arakawa and Madeline Gins, among other practitioners from a variety of disciplines, movements and periods.

Each work in the exhibition troubles the limits of what a body can consume, process, reach and become, from the metamorphosis that comes from wearing a garment to complete transfigurations into surreal, new beings.

 

For more information please visit: swissinstitute.net

Categories
News

New York Times’ T Magazine: Could Architecture Help You Live Forever?

The New York Times’ T Magazine has published a new article about the work and life of Arakawa and Madeline Gins.

 

CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE

 

“Could Architecture Help You Live Forever?

For a pair of avant-garde artists, eternal life wasn’t just a dream — it was a possibility. As long, that is, as you were committed to an uncomfortable existence.

The search for immortality has always been a subtext of architecture. From the pyramids, thought to have been designed as massive stairways so the soul of the deceased pharaoh could ascend to the heavens, to the aspirationally named New York Coliseum, the 1956 exhibition space, demolished in 2000, that was Robert Moses’s bid to join the company of the Roman emperors, many structures are created with an eye toward a life everlasting.

But Madeline Gins and her husband, Shusaku Arakawa …had a more literal, if whimsical, take on cheating death: The pair purported to believe that their structures could actually allow their inhabitants eternal life.”

T Magazine, August 20, 2019

Categories
Recent Exhibitions

Impossible Architecture

The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan will present the exhibition, Impossible Architecture, in collaboration with three other museums; Niigata City Art Museum, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National Museum of Art, Osaka. The exhibition will travel through these four public museums in Japan from February 2019 until March 2020, and will be featuring several artworks by Arakawa and Madeline Gins, including a large-scale model of The Process in Question/Bridge of Reversible Destiny, also known as the “Epinal Project”.

This exhibition featuring an array of international unbuilt architectural designs of the 20th century and onward, has the working title “Impossible Architecture.” The word “impossible” in this context does not mean “impossible” simply because of any radical or unreasonable demands of the architectural design, but refers to the restrictive boundaries of each project’s social time and place, and encourages us to revisit and re-examine the possibilities lying at these architectural frontiers. By placing the focus on the impossibility of this architecture, paradoxically their extreme possibilities and rich potentials come to the fore, abundantly fulfilling the very aim of this exhibition.

Through a diverse mix of plans, models, and other related materials, the “Impossible Architecture” exhibition closely analyzes the extraordinarily imaginative projects of some 40 architects and artists, and casts the spotlight on new forms of architecture that have never been seen before.

 

Venues, Dates and Locations:

Museum of Modern Art, Saitama
Dates: February 2 – March 24, 2019

Location:
〒330-0061
9-30-1, Tokiwa, Urawa-ku, Saitama-shi, (in Kita-Urawa Park), Japan
Tel: 048-824-0111

https://www.pref.spec.ed.jp

 

Niigata City Art Museum
Dates: April 13 – July 15, 2019

Location:
〒951-8556 Niigata, Chuo Ward, Nishiohatacho, 5191−9, Japan
Tel: +81-25-223-1622

https://www.ncam.jp

 

Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art
Dates: September 18 – December 8, 2019

Location:
1-1 Hijiyamakoen, Minami Ward, Hiroshima, 732-0815, Japan
Tel: +81-82-264-1121 

https://www.hiroshima-moca.jp

 

The National Museum of Art, Osaka
Dates: January 7 – March 15, 2020

Location: 4-2-55 Nakanoshima, Kita-ku, Osaka, 530-0005, Japan
Tel: +81-6-6447-4680

https://www.nmao.go.jp/en/

 

This exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, Satama, Niigata City Art Museum, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, The Ntaional Museum of Art, Osaka, The Yomiuri Shimbun and the Japan Association of Art Museums.