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Akihiko Miyoshi: Through Lens and Screen

Akihiko Miyoshi
Akihiko Miyoshi, ‘Statement’ (detail), 2019

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Toronto, ON, September 3, 2019Circuit Gallery presents new work by gallery artist Akihiko Miyoshi. In this latest project, Miyoshi pushes his interest in the aesthetic space of digital and networked structures to consider questions of affect and representation, working to find a visual language that conveys the mediated experience of seeing through lenses and on screens.

The sixteen decidedly analog and material new works presented in Through Lens and Screen—what Miyoshi simply calls ‘Resin Paintings’—are comprised of thick layers of resin and inkjet pigment, built-up or sandwiched together to create unique and ‘active’ images, images that are constituted by looking through the layers from a given position in space. The resin here becomes a substrate that both resembles and takes us closer to the experience of looking at screens or through viewfinders.

As Miyoshi explains—“I consider the work phenomenological and active. This active quality is important. It is a departure from the traditional static image based on paper or canvas. This allows for a new visual language that I believe is suited to invoke the digital and the network, both of which do not have, in and of themselves, a material basis.”

Miyoshi’s new work, which he categorizes under the subheadings ‘Networks,’ ‘Screens, Monitors and Viewfinders,’ ‘Theory,’ and ‘Computer Drawings / Code Paintings,’ can be seen in relation to the debates in digital aesthetics around the possibility of representing networks. This is how new media theorist James J. Hodge frames it in his essay ‘New Maps, New Poetics: New Works by Akihiko Miyoshi’ that accompanies the exhibition:

All images of the internet look the same! So runs the complaint voiced by media critic Alexander R. Galloway in his 2012 book The Interface Effect. In his artist statement Akihiko Miyoshi cites Galloway’s discussion of the ostensible ‘unrepresentability’ of networks as seminal for his recent work. As Miyoshi notes, Galloway’s provocation has two parts: all images of the network look the same; and even at this late date in the twenty-first century we still lack a poetic or aesthetic vocabulary for imaging and imagining networks. Guided by a dual interest in both the material infrastructure of technology as well as the paradoxically sensual and intangible aesthetic experience of the internet, Miyoshi’s recent works […] provide a timely and sophisticated set of artistic responses to Galloway, and, by extension, to fundamental issues at the heart of contemporary visuality, technology, and experience.

Akihiko Miyoshi: Through Lens and Screen runs September 5 through 28 at Circuit Gallery @ Prefix ICA, in Toronto.


BIOS
Born in Japan, Akihiko Miyoshi received his MFA in photography in 2005 from the Rochester Institute of Technology after leaving a PhD program in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University to pursue art. Miyoshi is currently an Associate Professor of photography and digital media at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Miyoshi’s work explores the intersection between art and technology most frequently dealing with issues surrounding representation. His exhibition record includes shows in Portland, New York, Los Angeles, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and Toronto. He was named the International Award Winner of Fellowship 12 at The Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh PA, and the finalist for the Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum in 2012 and Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2013. Miyoshi received a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2012. He is represented by Circuit Gallery, Toronto.

Artist Page: Akihiko Miyoshi

James J. Hodge is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. His essays on digital aesthetics have appeared in Critical Inquiry, ASAP/Journal, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. His book Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art will be published this October by the University of Minnesota Press.


Akihiko Miyoshi
Through Lens and Screen

September 5 – 28, 2019
Circuit Gallery @ Prefix ICA
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 124
Toronto, ON, M6R 2G5
[ Google Map ]

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12:00 – 5:00 p.m.


Akihiko Miyoshi
Akihiko Miyoshi, ‘Nodes and Edges’ (with detail), 2019
Akihiko Miyoshi
Akihiko Miyoshi, ‘Split’ (detail), 2019
Akihiko Miyoshi
Akihiko Miyoshi, ‘Inversion’ and ‘Negative Shift’, 2019

Visit Circuit Gallery for more information and to see more images:
www.circuitgallery.com/exhibitions


ABOUT CIRCUIT GALLERY
Circuit Gallery specializes in contemporary photography. Established in 2008 by Susana Reisman and Claire Sykes, the Toronto based commercial gallery represents both emerging and established Canadian and international artists.

Web: www.circuitgallery.com

Email: info@circuitgallery.com
Phone: 647-477-2487

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James J. Hodge essay on Akihiko Miyoshi

Exhibition essay

New Maps, New Poetics: New Works by Akihiko Miyoshi

by James J. Hodge

All images of the internet look the same! So runs the complaint voiced by media critic Alexander R. Galloway in his 2012 book The Interface Effect. In his artist statement Akihiko Miyoshi cites Galloway’s discussion of the ostensible “unrepresentability” of networks as seminal for his recent work. As Miyoshi notes, Galloway’s provocation has two parts: all images of the network look the same; and even at this late date in the twenty-first century we still lack a poetic or aesthetic vocabulary for imaging and imagining networks. Guided by a dual interest in both the material infrastructure of technology as well as the paradoxically sensual and intangible aesthetic experience of the internet, Miyoshi’s recent works in Through Lens and Screen, his latest exhibition at Circuit Gallery, provide a timely and sophisticated set of artistic responses to Galloway, and, by extension, to fundamental issues at the heart of contemporary visuality, technology, and experience.

Optically striking, playfully experiential, at once abstract and representational, Miyoshi’s new works gently recall the appearance of maps of the internet lamented by Galloway as all-too homogeneously visualizing the internet (for reference, just do a Google image search for the word “network” and you’ll sympathize with Galloway’s despair). Of course, Miyoshi does so with a profound difference. This difference can be felt in all of his sixteen new works on exhibit, and perhaps most profoundly in the series of three pieces called “Networks”: Protocol, Nodes and Edges, and Arpanet. Like generic network images, they evoke the internet as cosmic wheels of clustering galaxies of connection. But in Miyoshi, the network emerges as both an image and an experience: a space of abstraction simultaneously warmed and complicated by the presence of the hand of the artist as well as the works’ continual imperative to move around, to get closer, to see it from different angles, in effect to zoom in and to zoom out but also to move laterally along the surface of the painting in order to animate its character.

Each work in Miyoshi’s new collection features multiple layers of resin. Because each work contains images in distinctly laminated layers, the viewer’s perception of each image changes subtly as one moves around in studied proximity. Sometimes this means that a “red” element only exists through the combination of two layered colors, which have been selected to produce red when viewed head on. Sometimes this means that the images themselves seem to shimmer, blur, and re-articulate themselves when viewed from side to side, from the thickness of one edge around to another. Miyoshi’s uniquely sculptural approach gives his work a remarkable thickness and presence suggestive of a surface not merely to be looked at but also walked alongside and felt in different proximities so as to evoke a certain sensation of tactility. The resin layers contribute to an effect which simultaneously pulls the viewer in and around and pushes her away to get a bigger picture. There is no one perfect vantage from which to see these works. They must be seen in movement.

Layers constitute not only the decisive formal element of Miyoshi’s new work that unlocks their experiential dimensions. Layers also represent insight into Miyoshi’s broader engagement with digital aesthetics. As anyone, for example, who has ever worked with Adobe Photoshop knows, digital images can be constructed with unprecedented precision using different “layers,” or essentially elements such as found images as well as newly created images put “on top” of existing images. The application Snapchat’s famous “filters” represents another version of digital layering, often in the form of adding things like cartoon-like mustaches and glasses on top of the subject of a selfie. More generally, one finds layers everywhere in graphical user interfaces—since the 1980s the most popular way to interface with computers. The desktop metaphor of files, folders, and trashcans has normalized dragging and dropping pictures around on illuminated screens, actions, which, in turn, depend on the formalized layering of different images on top of others on the computer screen. In fact, layers are so commonplace in digital aesthetics as to seem perfectly ordinary and unremarkable. At this late date in the history of computing, layers often work so well as to be completely undetectable. Miyoshi’s work calls attention to this fundamental dimension of everyday seeing. There’s nothing natural about the way we use computers or perceive images on them. One of the great achievements of Miyoshi’s work is that he shows us how things might be otherwise.

One of Miyoshi’s key interventions is to re-articulate the relation of the digital and the analog. He does so not merely by addressing computers and networks through the traditionally analog medium of painting. His work also expresses the entanglement of human and machinic action through his layered approach to gesture. In general, the works on display have what might be called a “computational” character. They feature complex geometrical elements and patterns arranged with a sort of rigorous precision that only feels possible with the computer. In this regard, Miyoshi’s work recalls the abstract precision of early computer art such as the computer-generated prints of artists Frieder Nake and Manfred Mohr. As art historian Grant Taylor observes, the rigid precision of these early works from the 1960s led to the art world’s resounding rejection of the computer as a “soulless usurper.” This strident formulation derives in large part from fears that the computer would replace the “hand of the artist,” the unique character of artistic expression but also the perceived physical presence of the artist in the quality of brushstrokes and line. Well aware of the history of what used to be called “computer art” (and is now contestably referred to as digital art or new media art), Miyoshi engages and builds on the still-underrecognized achievements of these early artists. And, like the early artists, his work features a stark “computationalism” in its inclusion of grids, sharp lines, and network graphs. However, in a sharp departure from the tendencies of “cold” computationalism, Miyoshi’s work manifestly celebrates the hand of the artist through the use of gestural lines evoking a more “human” presence within and through the thickness of networked visuality.

Miyoshi’s use of gesture is evident in many of recent works, and perhaps most clearly in the 5-painting series entitled “Computer Drawings/Code Paintings.” Yet his use of gestural line differs greatly across these works. In For Loop the line appears mostly continuous. In Statement the line nearly disappears into a discontinuous sequence of pixels implying some phantom link between them. In a number of works, the line itself blurs slightly as it runs deeper into layers of resin and then back suddenly to the surface. In short, Miyoshi’s line represents no simple valorization of the humanity of the artist. If the lines feel a bit digital, there’s a good reason why! Miyoshi created the lines through a distinctly computational process. By capturing the movement of his movement of a mouse at a slow frame rate, Miyoshi was able to evoke the jagged, pixelated aesthetic of older computer paint programs and to express more conceptually the feeling of the hand of the artist at work at a tethered remove from conscious intention, the resulting image being part craft and part algorithmic program.

To conclude by returning to Galloway’s complaint as an inspiration for Miyoshi, let us revisit the beleaguered generic map of the network. The reason these images remain so ubiquitous is that they effectively present a comprehensible diagram-like picture of something very difficult to grasp: how the internet works. The internet functions at scales and speeds that often outstrip human cognition and perceptual ability. But it’s easy to imagine each point as a person (or at least as a laptop or phone) connected to other groups of persons and machines. Hence, the generic image of the network. This image of the network, however, communicates little if nothing about the material infrastructure of the internet as routers, cables, undersea networks, and more. By crafting—if not outright sculpting—his images in layers of resin, Miyoshi draws attention to the materiality of his subject while building on and advancing the generic genius of the network image.

Finally, for all the aspects of his work discussed above and more, Miyoshi answers the second part of Galloway’s complaint: that we still lack any poetics of the network. This last part of Galloway’s claim has been contested by various scholars, but it has never been refuted. Although he works offline in the analog and quite material world of “RL” or “real life,” Miyoshi’s new works provides a vibrant new way of beginning to see, feel, and think about the experience of networks in the twenty-first century.

James J. Hodge, September 2019
©James J. Hodge. All Rights Reserved.


Bio

James J. Hodge is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. His essays on digital aesthetics have appeared in Critical Inquiry, ASAP/Journal, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. His book Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art will be published this October by the University of Minnesota Press.

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Akihiko Miyoshi: CMYKRGB

Akihiko Miyoshi
Akihiko Miyoshi, CMYKRGB, detail, 2014

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Akihiko Miyoshi: pushing the intersection of art and technology into new territory

Toronto, ON, March 26, 2015Circuit Gallery is pleased to present CMYKRGB, an exhibition of new abstract photographic and installation work by Portland Oregon based artist Akihiko Miyoshi.

In this latest work, Miyoshi pushes his interest in the intersection of art and technology into new territory. While Miyoshi has consistently engaged questions specific to photographic representation – exploiting the conventions of perception, questioning the status of both the photographer/author and the referent/real in the digital age – here he extends his investigation into the very processes and conditions of contemporary image production.

I believe we live in a moment where the torrent of the digital and the inertia of the analog collide with each other creating an aesthetic and lived experience unique to our time…. This collision is the subject of the works presented.

The works exhibited exist, conceptually, somewhere between painting and photography. Visually, they are between formal abstraction and photographic representation.

Using photography, a medium whose indexicality clings to the real, Miyoshi performs a variety of gestures that bring to the fore the tensions between the analog and the digital. These gestures range from very material and mechanical performative actions undertaken in the studio in front of the camera (using paper, paint, light, mirrors, and the artists own body), to manipulations within the software (digital gestures such as offsetting the color channel), through to collaborations with the digital algorithms of the software – “letting it think” and act.

Miyoshi seeks to represent something of our contemporary experience of what is pervasive yet elusive, known only through the effects of optics, algorithms, data, and mediation – and experienced though screens and web browsers, 8-bit aesthetics, and virtual worlds.

The works evoke what is intangible or unrepresentable, and yet oddly familiar, by revealing something of the processes underneath the act of representation. Questioning and revealing the spaces between pigment and light, the tensions between the material and immaterial, the real and the virtual, between human and machine, between certainty and uncertainty, Miyoshi’s new work allegorically offers a way to look at the complexity of our present state.

The exhibition is accompanied by the essay, “Photography and the ‘Artifacts of Software’: Akihiko Miyoshi’s CMYKRGB,” by Toronto-based writer and researcher Emily Doucet.


BIO
Born in Japan, Akihiko Miyoshi received his MFA in photography in 2005 from the Rochester Institute of Technology after leaving a PhD program in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University to pursue art. Miyoshi is an Associate Professor of Photography and Digital Media at Reed College (Portland, OR). His work explores the intersection between art and technology most frequently dealing with issues surrounding photographic representation.

His work has been exhibited widely including Portland, New York, Los Angeles, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and Toronto. He was named the International Award Winner of Fellowship 12 at The Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh PA, and the finalist for the Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum in 2012 and Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2013. Miyoshi received a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2012.


Akihiko Miyoshi: CMYKRGB runs April 9 through May 2 at Circuit Gallery @ Prefix ICA, with an opening reception on Wednesday, April 8, from 6 – 9 PM.


Akihiko Miyoshi

CMYKRGB

April 9 – May 2, 2015

Reception: Wednesday, April 8, 6-9 p.m.

Circuit Gallery @ Prefix ICA
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 124
Toronto, ON, M6R 2G5
[ Google Map ]

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday, 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Akihiko Miyoshi
Akihiko Miyoshi, Process Structure #4, from the series Process Structures, 2014
Akihiko Miyoshi
Akihiko Miyoshi, Process Structure #1, from the series Process Structures, 2014
Akihiko Miyoshi
Akihiko Miyoshi, Process Structure #7, from the series Process Structures, 2014

Visit Circuit Gallery for more information and to see more images:
www.circuitgallery.com/exhibitions


ABOUT CIRCUIT GALLERY
Circuit Gallery specializes in contemporary photography. Established in 2008 by Susana Reisman and Claire Sykes, the Toronto based commercial gallery represents both emerging and established Canadian and international artists.

Web: www.circuitgallery.com

Email: info@circuitgallery.com
Phone: 647-477-2487

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Emily Doucet essay

Catalogue essay

Photography and the ‘Artifacts of Software’:
Akihiko Miyoshi’s CMYKRGB

by Emily Doucet

As the American poet Eileen Myles confessed in an essay: “the rupture with reality one feels when writing about art is that there is a tendency to make manifestos out of someone else’s play.”1 In an attempt to place words in lines to describe the images in Akihiko Miyoshi’s exhibition CMYKRGB, I was presented with a diversity of digital and immaterial formats of work: .jpeg, .gif, URL, and even a 3-D model of the exhibition space to be. While the implication that the digital is in fact immaterial represents a common disavowal of the material, ecological, and human consequences of information technology and digital production, my first encounters with Miyoshi’s work were appropriately situated somewhere between my computer and the gallery space.

In an artist statement accompanying the exhibition, Miyoshi charts and maps the point of tension sketched out in the processes of his image-making: “we live in a moment where the torrent of the digital and the inertia of the analog collide with each other creating an aesthetic and lived experience unique to our time.” In a similar spirit, the artist and philosopher Hito Steyerl has stated that she sees “images as modes of energy and matter which shape and effect people and monuments.”2 Steyerl argues that we live amongst – and even as – images, and that images have begun to invade reality. Fundamentally, she suggests that “affect is rendered as an after-effect, reality is post-produced, and we can change it by post-production, we can intervene by means of imaging techniques.”3 In a world where both everyday reality and human consciousness are produced by and function in tandem with images and screens, object-subject distinctions become increasingly complex. I mean this not only in the sense of the body’s relation to the technological (as in cyborg theory for example) but also the relation of mind and cognition to the proliferation of images in accelerated capitalism. Human interaction with technology hovers between the figures of the cyborg and that of the avatar and Miyoshi’s images map this journey of representation. However, digital labour (here, photographic manipulation) is emphatically still labour and the question remains of how and where the body is to be seen or felt. Current emphasis on materiality and production is therefore bound up in our political moment and the role of images in the definition of possible pasts and futures.

Miyoshi has described several of the works in his exhibition as a “collaboration with the digital algorithms which [are] no longer a mere simple tool but one that has its own ideas about object ontology.”4 He points to the “content-aware” tool in Adobe® Photoshop™ software which, when applied, selects, outlines and removes what it determines to be objects and/or subjects in the background or foreground of the image. Imagining photography as the transmission of information (pixels) as opposed to the interaction of light and chemicals on the material surface of the photographic print, Miyoshi highlights the evident tensions between these various embodiments of the medium. Playing with the prescribed and static algorithms of standard photo-editing programs, Miyoshi explores the established and pixel-oriented definition of subjects and objects within digital image worlds. Treading a well-worn path of investigation into the relationship between subjectivity and automation, Miyoshi’s images are situated almost between mediums, borrowing from the visual languages of photography, painting, collage, and sculpture.

Miyoshi differentiates between his earlier “abstract” photographs and his later “process,” images; the former highlights the framing apparatus of the camera’s lens, while the latter explores the creative potential of the prescribed algorithms of photo-editing software. The content aware algorithm excavates objects, based on significant differentiation between hex number (colour) of pixels. Thus form is defined by colour, establishing a surprisingly formal, and even modernist basis for what at first glance appears to be digitally informed.

In e-mail correspondence, Miyoshi refers to the content-aware function in Photoshop as an “artifact of software,” singling out the complex conception of materiality at play in this series of images. An artifact signals something of human creation, usually of historical or cultural interest. Uncertain objects emerge within the frame of Miyoshi’s images. Painterly and even sculptural in form, the Process Structure series appears to be furthering of many of the concerns of the Abstract Photographs series. What was made explicit through imaging the body in dialogue with the camera has now left both body and apparatus outside the frame, imaging instead the abstractions of colour and code, mirror and paper.

Through Miyoshi’s manipulation of the photographic, colour is understood as an object, or at least as something with its own temporal form. As objects and subjects are determined by differences in pixel colour, Miyoshi’s use of coloured paper in Process Structure #6 and Process Structure #7, contrasts the very real material qualities of paper against the immaterial, or at the very least uncertain materiality of the shapes determined by the pixel analysis performed by the software. Uncertain object-ness thus floats to the top of Miyoshi’s words and images. Somewhere between the body of the artist, the physical weight of the camera and the embodiment of colour transposed into form, the images remain transient.

The projection piece, The Distance Between included in the exhibition, speaks to just this tension between body, apparatus and image; the viewer creates the image only through the physical act of looking in concert with the lens of the camera. Moving past the overt relationship between the body and the apparatus, which is defined in the Abstract Photographs series, Miyoshi’s later work, shown here together, celebrates rather than questions the occultism and esotericism of computer programming. Invoking the mysticism ingrained in the audience’s understanding of the processes at play behind his images, one is left considering where this thinking could lead Miyoshi next, ensuring artistic production does not water-down the artist’s knowledge of computer science, through the translation of the exploration of these themes in the language of visual art. How does one generate substantial and epistemological claims through the language of photography?

Miyoshi’s own disciplinary redefinition, leaving a PhD program in Electrical and Computer Engineering to pursue an MFA in photography, seems key here, outlining a search for and exploration of a variety of languages with which to define… something. A diagram acts as an artist statement, outlining the visual complexity and multi-directionality of terms and reference points Miyoshi oscillates between and amongst. How – can – I – make – myself – write – a – functional – program – without – myself? We can read multiple sentences or narratives across Miyoshi’s diagram, a network that obscures as much as it communicates.

At the bottom of the diagram, the words “digital image” and “imagination” sit across from each other, connected only through the central question mark, an apt mapping of the tension embodied in Miyoshi’s line of questioning. Most intriguing of these allusions perhaps is the animation of the supposed indexicality of the medium of photography in concert with the language of computer programming and algorithms, which define our interactions with digital images. As Miyoshi himself has suggested: how can we use these languages as allegorical devices with which to define the complexity of our present state?


NOTES
1. Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 111.
2. “The Photographic Universe: Photography and Political Agency?”, online lecture recorded at the New School, New York on April 24, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqQ3UTWSmUc. Accessed: November 30, 2014.
3. Ibid.
4. Miyoshi, “Artist Statement.”

Emily Doucet, March 2015
©Emily Doucet. All Rights Reserved.


Bio

Emily Doucet is a writer and researcher based in Toronto, Canada. Currently working on her PhD in the History of Art at University of Toronto, she holds an MA in the History of Art from University College London. Her current research explores the boundaries between artistic practice and scientific research, with a focus on speculative fictions and photography in nineteenth century France.

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