WANICORZ

 

Experimental Music Lab.

INTERDISCIPLINARY ART:   
Live Performance, Interactive Digital Projection, and Original  synthsizer, WANICORON

 

 

Artist Wanico is well known for her work as a composer and experimental sound artist. The WANICORZ project extends her practice beyond the listening ear, into the world of digital media and visual arts. The project presents multimedia events around themes of identity from a contemporary Japanese perspective. Wanico is a central focus of the works, her embodied performance an integral component.
One recent work, titled Live Of aliVE, combines digital imagery, gesture controlled sound, and live performance into a durational gallery installation. It features multi-layered videos including: the artist’s mother undergoing heart surgery with a balloon catheter dilation in process; the spinal cord after diagnostic injection of radiopaque dye; and the artist’s childhood with her mother. Wanico is present in the center of the video projections, actively generating the audio elements. She plays a synthesizer of her own creation, a WANICORON. Live Of aliVE joins the process of a mother's rebirth with the artist’s ongoing identity formation. It focuses on mysteries of corporeal self, while moving beyond that literal construct.

WANICORZ projects are influenced by Japanese traditions and by the works of artists Atau Tanaka, Pamala Z, and Mona Hatoum. Tanaka has been an active contributor to the Tokyo noise music and media arts scenes; his processes encourage experimentation and development of new forms. The live performance, sound, and digital video installations of Pamala Z emphasize the contested role of a female artist in gallery space and in the world of media arts. Hatoum’s creation, titled Corps Étranger, includes video of enlarged bodily matter. Her imagery is equally fantastic and repulsive. Those conflicting notions reflect our unresolved opinions of self, as well.