Meet Up
The City Demands Imagination: What Is Creating at CCBT?
Overview
Panelists: Ueda Maki (Olfactory Artist), Kishi Yuma (Artist), Doi Itsuki (Musician, complex systems researcher, Senior Researcher, Alternative Machine Inc.), Fujishima Sacco (Artist), Yamauchi Souta (Artist) Moderator: SIDE CORE (Artist Collective)
Marking its relocation to Harajuku, CCBT hosts an opening talk to foster a space where artists, designers, researchers, engineers, cultural workers, and citizens from diverse backgrounds all come together, and to consider ways to gain footholds toward co-creation with reference to global and urban trends. From its launch in 2022 to 2024, CCBT collaborated with a total of fifteen artist fellows through its signature Art Incubation program, generating a wide variety of projects and forms of creative expression in Tokyo, inspired by the imagination of practitioners. These works and endeavors are not limited to Tokyo, but have spread out from CCBT to appear in other cities around the world. In this opening talk, artist fellows Ueda Maki, Kishi Yuma, Doi Itsuki, Fujishima Sacco, and Yamauchi Shota, who are all engaged in ambitious projects exploring CCBT’s 2025 theme of the Future Commons, introduce their activities. As moderator, the talk welcomes SIDE CORE, a 2022 artist fellow who is also presenting a special exhibition at CCBT to mark its reopening. The discussion encompasses possibilities for making imaginative interventions in urban spaces, social systems, and what we take for granted in everyday life, and the transformations that such actions bring to our cities and the people who live there. Through this discussion, the talk considers the role that collaboration between artists and other creators and a future CCBT can play in society.
Access
LIFORK HARAJUKU (WITH HARAJUKU 3F, 1-14-4 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo)
1 minutes’ walk from Harajuku Station (JR Yamanote Line), 1 minutes’ walk from Meiji-jingumae ＜Harajuku＞ Station (Tokyo Metro Chiyoda and Fukutoshin lines)
2025 Artist Fellow Projects
Ueda Maki “Olfacto-Politics: The Air as a Medium”
This multifaceted project takes smell as a starting point for exploring the notion of the air we breathe as part of the commons, and attempts to make it possible to see and experience the air. The project comprises three parts: offering opportunities to learn in the form of lectures and workshops; conducting research to make the olfactory visible by using technology to measure the highly subjective sense that is smell; and creating and exhibiting spatial works that express air circulation. In this way, the project takes the air, the medium by which humans and all living creatures exchange manifold kinds of information, as a stepping stone to encourage us to think about biodiversity and biomes, and to inspire new ways of looking at the world.
Kishi Yuma “Parallel Botanical Garden“
This project develops “botanical intelligence” (BI), a way of looking at AI from the perspective of botany. Through precise sensing of pluralistic environmental data on light, wind, soil, and more, and adopting a generative BI approach that outputs text and speech, it aims to develop a commons where humans and nonhumans alike can prosper. In addition to showcasing the completed system as an installation in the form of a botanical garden, the project collaborates with experts and holds public lectures and workshops as part of the research and development process. While based at CCBT, the project explores its themes in terms of nature as a resource shared by all beings, and strives to discover a new co-prosperity zone.
Doi Itsuki「Weather」
By collaboratively creating sensors capable of measuring subtle environmental changes like wind, temperature, and light, and then installing these around the city, the project collects information on microclimates not captured by the wide area data gathered by conventional meteorological agencies, and then makes it publicly available. The project also develops a system for converting the data to a perceptual experience of sound, light, and wind, and utilizes that experience for an art installation. The project attempts to regain knowledge of other species that is rooted in human modes of physicality in digital society, skewed as it is toward language and image. https://cotofu.com/weather/
Fujishima Sacco “Voice Quest: Saved Data in the City“
This project makes a game that shifts how we view the world by visualizing hidden voices in the city and creating places for dialogue with people we never interacted with before. The avatars that appear in the game are generated from the stories of actual inhabitants of the city. Players come into contact with those inhabitants’ lives and pain, encountering other values and lifeways. That experience is developed into an installation, and records of the dialogue are edited and published. Against a backdrop of generational, gender, national, economic, and ideological divisions, the project searches for ways to open up possibilities for a new commons from the intersection of voices.
Yamauchi Shota “Encounters with the Unknown“
「未知なるものとは何か」という問いを出発点に、言語の枠組みに依存しない、ヒューマノイドと人間のあいだに生まれる新たなコミュニケーションの形を構想するプロジェクト。インスタレーション作品として屋外での発表を予定しており、「未知」との遭遇――すなわち「新たな自然」との出会いを試みる。作家自らによるデモンストレーションやレクチャーを通じて制作過程は広く公開され、ともに未知なるもの（未来）について想像することから、プロジェクトを通じて「これからのコモンズ」をかたちづくる想像力を養う。
Players
上田麻希
Ueda Maki
Olfactory artist
Since 2005, Ueda Maki has explored the intersection of scent and art, creating works that use smell and becoming a pioneering figure in the field of olfactory art. Since 2009, she has taught at institutions around the world including the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, nurturing a new generation of olfactory artists. Nominated five consecutive times for the Sadakichi Award for Experimental Work with Scent at the Art and Olfaction Awards―an international hallmark of olfactory art―and winner of the award in 2022, Ueda is also a recipient of the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award 2024. Currently based on the island of Ishigaki, she runs an olfactory art laboratory engaging in education and tourism while exhibiting and running workshops around the world.
岸裕真
Kishi Yuma
Artist
Kishi Yuma reinterprets AI as alien intelligence and proposes the emergent relationship between humans and AI as an alien subjectivity, which he explores through paintings, sculptures, and installations created in collaboration with an AI that he developed himself. Since 2023, the AI model MaryGPT has curated almost all of his work. Kishi’s exhibitions include the solo show Oracle Womb (2025, √K Contemporary, Tokyo) and the group show DXP2 (2024, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa). His awards include the short list for the CAF Award 2024. He is the author of Creating with the Unknown: On the Alien Encounter between Humans and AI (2025, Seibundo Shinkosha).
土井樹
Doi Itsuki
Musician, complex systems researcher; Senior Researcher, Alternative Machine Inc.
Doi Itsuki pursues research on synchrony in social groups. His artistic practice explores means of understanding the unique experiences and feelings of others, including artificial systems, from their own standpoints. His major exhibitions include ALTERNATIVE MACHINE (2021, WHITEHOUSE, Tokyo), I Forgot How to Look at the Ocean (2022, JINNAN HOUSE, Tokyo), MONAURALS (2023, WHITEHOUSE, Tokyo), and Harsh Listening (2025, LESSAYA, Tokyo). His music releases include Peeling Blue (CD, 2017).
藤嶋咲子
Fujishima Sacco
Artist
Fujishima Sacco works at the intersection of art, games, and social issues, using painting and interactive media to examine our relationship with contemporary society in multifaceted ways. In her major work WRONG HERO, she employs RPG-like structures to challenge stereotypes around gender and social roles, drawing viewers into a critically engaged experience as players. In Virtual Demo, voices are gathered in virtual space and enacted as real-world “events,” unsettling the boundary between virtual and physical realities, and prompting new forms of viewer agency and participation.
山内祥太
Yamauchi Shota
Artist
Born in 1992, Yamauchi Shota completed graduate studies in new media at Tokyo University of the Arts. He explores the relationship between the self and the world as well as the cracks that open up in reality and fantasy. In addition to moving image, sculpture, and performance, his transmedia practice has recently encompassed installations that use smell.
SIDE CORE
Featuring Takasu Sakie, Matsushita Tohru, and Nishihiro Taishi, SIDE CORE launched in 2012. Harimoto Kazunori also participates in the collective as a video director. SIDE CORE create works based on the question of how an individual can go about sending messages in the city and public space, by referencing the ideas and history behind street culture. They sometimes collaborate with artists working in other genres to create a variety of works in the blind spots and interstices of the city. Recent major exhibitions include “Living road, Living space” (21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, 2025), “SIDE CORE｜Concrete Planet” (WATARI-UM, The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art and outdoor, Tokyo, 2024), “Hyakunengo Art Festival” (Chiba, 2024), “8th Yokohama Triennale “Wild Grass: Our Lives”” (Kanagawa, 2024).