Yutaka Kikutake Gallery is pleased to present “human property (alien territory),” a solo exhibition of works by Norimichi Hirakawa from March 22^nd to April 27^th, 2019.

Channeling his attention to the subject of computation that serves to support all means of technology in contemporary society, Hirakawa has continued to present installations that while appearing primitive, appropriate both the mathematical processes and results achieved through computer programming. In recent years Hirakawa has also engaged his sound and video project “datum,” a work based on the theme of beauty in higher dimensional space, which he came to develop after his residency at the Kavli IPMU (Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe). The project has been presented at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, the pre-event of Sapporo International Art Festival, and Roppongi Crossing 2019 (currently talking place at Mori Art Museum until May 26^th 2019). "datum" is a work that attempts to observe beauty that is normally unseen by human beings through treating different concepts of space, color and time symmetrically in high dimensional space within which they are unified. The respective pixels of the video data are regarded as points designated through six numerical values and spatial coordinates: X and Y that represent space, R, G, B color mixing, and T for time which corresponds to the number of frames. By treating the pixels as a set of points floating within 6-dimensional space and arbitrary rotating them to to enable mutual convertibility between the gradation of color tone, curvature, and their temporal changes, what is achieved as a result is an integrated image. It is indeed a work that inspires our aesthetic interpretation through unrealistic perspectives that are conceived through universal operations.

This exhibition comprises of four works: 1.) An updated version of “known,” presented at ICC (Shinjuku) in 2015, in which a string of alphabetical letters are endlessly generated until reaching a capacity that can no longer be processed by the computer’s memory, ultimately resulting in the program to crash, all the while highlighting the names of existing people that appear amongst the array of letters. 2.) An updated version of the work “S³,” a two-dimensional visualization of a 3- sphere in four-dimensional Euclidean space that was presented in Poland in 2017. 3.) The latest version of “unknowns,” presented at YCAM (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media) in 2013, which serves to approach an image of a “human being” that can only exist as a specific person through a series portraits of women responding to interviews. 4.) The new work “Find ‘unicorn’s on the far side of the moon” that contemplates the definition of “meaning” through the process of searching for sections that are readable as specific strings from amongst the moon’s terrain data. Through Hirakawa’s latest works, the exhibition serves to introduce the appeal that permeates his practice that essentially derives from an interest in the connections and relationships between what people can enjoy due to their nature as human beings, and the realms of the unknown that constantly exist outside of them.