The new exhibition at TOKYO NODE brings together a wide-ranging selection of Tony Oursler’s work, from mAcHiNe E.L.F. (2023), in which optical crystal forms function as both sculptural objects and reflective projection surfaces, exploring the coexistence of science, mythology and spirituality, to the deeply personal Imponderable 1 (2017), which intertwines a collage of historical spiritualism with Oursler’s own family history. The exhibition moves fluidly between eras and states of consciousness: from the disembodied eyes of Specular (2021), watching visitors from floating orbs as they enter, to the screams of “Let me go” emerging from the crumpled clothes, hovering chair and disembodied face of performer Tracy Leipold in the early work Lost Time (1993).
He has collaborated with many renowned artists and musicians over the decades, including musician Kim Gordon, writer and performer Constance de Jonge, artist Mike Kelley, and filmmaker Tony Conrad. The inclusion of the collaborative (2000) piece Empty, bringing together David Bowie, Oursler and composer Glenn Branca, is indicative of the intersection of art, technology, music and performance that runs throughout the show. Featuring a glorious Technicolor projection of Bowie`s face, Empty has him performing Oursler’s text over Branca`s musical score while his image is transformed through a camera obscura into a psychedelic inverted apparition. At its centre Chimera (2026), a monumental new work created for the exhibition, housing large-scale projections that evoke a garden. The work places the earlier Caricature pieces, with their Tamagotchi-inspired faces, within a new environment, allowing them to resonate in unexpected ways.
Walking through the show is like moving fluidly between eras, exploring the somatic and psychological against a broader meditation on technology, consciousness and belief. From the legends of Nessie and the Yeti, rumours of UFOs, controversies around 5G to works that question control over our digitised images in C>o++ (2017), the viewer is left with a sense of what is visible and what remains unseen. Posing questions about technology, belief and our increasingly complex relationship with both at a time of social media bans and spiritual curiosity, this exhibition is perfectly positioned to offer a reflective space. Set against a cultural backdrop that embraces the animism of objects, it also adds another layer of meaning – offering a particularly intriguing dialogue between Oursler’s work and Japanese sensibilities. I had the pleasure of talking with one of the exhibition’s co-curators, Reiko Tsubaki, about the show.
Rachel: Looking across your curatorial history—from exhibitions exploring medicine, the cosmos, perception and human experience to Tony Oursler’s exploration of technology, consciousness and belief—there seems to be a recurring interest in how humans understand themselves and the world around them. Do you see a common thread connecting these projects?
Reiko: Yes, I think Our Ecology, which I organized in 2023, might also belong in that lineage. As you say what connects them is an interest in what it means to be human, and in how we perceive the environments we inhabit – the cosmos, the earth, the world at large. Human beings have always tried to understand the unknown, invisible. What draws our interest is what we don’t know – that’s why the cosmos is so interesting. Even in science, there are always rules; for example, we consider Rule A to be correct but sometimes we cannot continue anymore with this rule, then there is a paradigm shift.
In an exhibition I organised some years ago called The Universe and Art we traced how humanity has imagined and visualized the unknown territory of the cosmos, from classical narratives like The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter to contemporary space exploration. This Oursler exhibition, too, starts from the premise that technology and magic, science and belief, were never as cleanly separated historically as we assume – just as Newton, credited as a founder of modern science, was also a theologian and an alchemist. My own curiosity, I think, also lies in the history of these unknown territories, and in how human understanding of them has been transformed again and again through these paradigm shifts. I’m really interested in this kind of a paradigm shift that changes your view or your perspective completely. And that always needs human creativity or imagination. People historically thought that science and art were separate. But I think more and more now there’s a lot more understanding and a lot more curatorial interest in the interconnection of science and art. I thought technology, magic, science – this space is in the modern age with the same roots.
Tony Oursler has been exploring the relationship between technology, psychology, media and belief for more than four decades. What made this the right moment to present his work in Japan on such a significant scale?
With the rapid development of AI, surveillance technology and generative media, our perception and our sense of what to believe are changing and destabilizing. We question – what is real? It’s getting more and more hard to tell. At the same time, interest in spiritual conversation and unexplained phenomena is rising worldwide. In other words, we are living through a moment when the boundary modernity drew between rationality and irrationality, science and belief is being dissolved again by technology itself. The timing of his first scale exhibition in Japan resonates strongly, if coincidentally, with the mood of this exact moment.
That’s why media, magic, media art is the second subtitle, and Tech/Gnosis is the main one. Oursler was treating how human beings perceive things as his long historical essay. He has treated this in-between space- this Tech/Gnosis as the core of his practice for more than forty years, so it feels significant to be able to present his work in Tokyo precisely at this juncture, and specifically in Toranomon. This site carries the memory of Onmyodo and feng shui thinking layered into Edo-period planning.
You’ve mentioned the influence of feng shui and Onmy?d? in relation to the site, and Oursler has spoken about “Electric animism” in his work. Do you see a resonance between his approach to technology, objects and the unseen and Japanese ways of thinking about spirits and presence?
He may not have been consciously aware of it, but he’s working with the space and the elements. Oursler has had a long relationship with Japan ever since his first visit in 1987, for the Japan International Video Television Festival at Spiral in Tokyo, organized by Fujiko Nakaya. He had already seen Kabuki performances in the United States in the 1970s; he was very interested in Kuroko wearing black – they are the people who are in the background – he thought that something that doesn’t exist, we consider it to exist, and something existing, we consider not existing was interesting.
And he has spoken repeatedly about the shock that Ukiyo-e prints delivered to the West. I’m personally very interested in the resonance between the work and the animistic worldview embodied in the idea of yaoyorozu no kami – the sense that spirit inhabits objects and places. I think animism nowadays, and AI, can fit very well. In Japan, you have to treat objects well – it’s a respectful thing to do. There is an embodied aspect – the works of Caricature, inspired by Tamagotchi, are different, but once you see them, you can feel that they are quite cute, you know? Even though they are not alive, it’s the same with a stuffed toy – it sometimes clearly has a personality, and as a child, you treat it like a real person. But his work is larger than just the idea of animism. I don’t want to simply fold his practice into Japanese animism. If anything, he fully takes on the institutions of Western modernity – theatre, cinema, special effects, psychology and surveillance apparatus – and works from inside them to summon the spiritual back.
Yes, I think the inclusion of the work Empty, made 25 years ago(1999-2000) with David Bowie and Glenn Branca, also shows an important early connection to Western media theory that often analyses things through the lenses of alienation, spectacle or apparatus control (McLuhan, Baudrillard), but his work humanises the objects or technology rather than positioning them simply as tools. This feels close to the Japanese traditions of Bunraku puppets or karakuri robotics…
Do you think there’s also a hunger for the spiritual more than in past eras in contrast to the rise of technology, that as we become more, maybe in a sense, disconnected, there’s also a hunger to search for meaning?
Yes, I think so. The difference is that at the beginning of the 20th century, with the modernisation and industrialisation, people felt like they were becoming a machine. So they needed this spiritualism. Nowadays, actually, spiritualism is in this technology itself. So that’s the difference.
The title Tech/Gnosis suggests a dialogue between technological knowledge and more mysterious, intuitive forms of understanding. How does this concept reflect the essence of Oursler`s practice?
The title emerged out of repeated conversations with co-curator Alice Nien-Pu Ko and with Oursler himself. The three of us worked together – we were talking about what could be the theme or title, and the idea of magic came out. In the end, we decided on technology and gnosis – Tony came up with the word “Gnosis”. It’s really good, because we can see where the ideas of technology and the spiritual fit together, and he chose this to be an integral part of the title. I wouldn’t say people worship art, but it has symbolism, it has very deep connections for people, and they can come and be in this almost altered space.
It puts into words a feeling that over the past two hundred years, we have gradually offloaded human consciousness onto machines, and yet the impulse toward transcendence has never disappeared. We are living, in a sense, in an age of re-enchantment. Oursler’s practice has always made visible the very place where these two poles – technology and rationality and belief in the unseen – pull towards each other. By making voices emerge from external devices rather than from within the body, and by projecting faces onto screens and dummies, he always shows that the self is experienced – not as a single centre, but as the intersection of multiple circuits. In that sense, his work anticipated today`s condition, where technology is no longer merely a tool, but an environment capable of generating belief itself. Eric Davis’s book TechGnosis, which encompasses much of this terrain, was a reference for me when I was writing my essay, although Tony himself was not yet aware of the publication.
Many of Oursler’s works were created before the rise of today’s AI, social media and virtual identities. How did you approach creating a dialogue between his earlier works and his more recent explorations? And are there any aspects that feel particularly relevant to now?
Tony and Alice and I talked about that. We saw that it’s really difficult just to have a linear story. The exhibition isn’t structured around a single narrative. He actually made a sketch—you can see it in the catalogue—which reads more like a map, in which vision, perception, psychology, belief and environment are all interwoven. That said, the movement of the route is from Specular`s experience of watching and being watched, through the new work Star, into Private domestic traditional space, on through recent works referencing facial recognition and the Rorschach test, and finally into the last room, with the new commission Chimera alongside Caricature.
He was really someone who saw ahead of his time. He knew what was going to happen. For example, the work U4EUH from 1991 that dealt with the euphoria of staring at a computer or phone screen until you can no longer look away. It has this kind of capsule, with a monitor inside. It’s about how, as human beings, we are consuming the media and becoming euphoric.
As if Technology is becoming like a drug?
Yes. This work was created in 1991, so it was very early to really know.
I think his work from the 90s and the 2000s was almost looking at the kind of things that are really big social issues now. Almost “prophetic”…
Yes, – it reads today almost as a direct anticipation of our conversation about social media addiction. C>o++, from 2017, references facial-recognition technology and foresaw our current condition, in which the face circulates as data reduced to coordinates and numbers – a new kind of portrait. Lock 2, 4, 6, from 2010, is based on psychological research into confirmation bias, which is essentially the algorithmic filter bubble we talk about now. Oursler isn’t condemning technology itself; he has consistently observed how technology amplifies human desire and anxiety. That’s precisely why works from the 90s and 2000s feel newly urgent in the current age of AI.
It’s also about surveillance and how you make your identity in the home. He’s always interested in the identity or roles of men and women. He talked about, for example, David Bowie. For him, David Bowie is not only masculine – he is genderless, so he could become many different types of person. So, that, for him, was also very charming. Empty, his collaboration with David Bowie and Glenn Branca, finally realized after a quarter of a century, is itself emblematic of that dialogue across time – and the three works on the floor. In that decade, he was always asking Tracy Leipold to do this performance. Tony is male. She is female – and this creates an inversion or “upside down” – a mixing together, so there are multiple identities. Sometimes this idea of multiple selves is considered a disease. But he treated it as something more; we say it’s a disorder, but for him it was also a possibility – the possibilities within us all.
The new work Chimera was created specifically for TOKYO NODE. How did the architecture and scale of the space influence the development of this work and the overall exhibition experience?
Actually, he came to see the place at the end of September or the beginning of October. After Arts Maebashi did the GHOST exhibition, he was invited to the installation opening. That was really good timing, so we could ask him to come to see the space. He really liked this space. Chimera is installed on the 45th floor, and the ceiling has a height of 15 metres. This station tower is designed like an activity band, which is a vertical band that draws the energy of the boulevard or street upward, so the audience can have the feeling of moving and being so high up. It’s beautiful. It’s like a skyscraper in the sky.
The piece Chimera was made for this show. Oursler conceived a work of that scale as an ecosystem, something like a garden. Micro-organisms lurk in a pond; presences appear among the trees and in the shadows of rocks, and in the air above, chimeric beings from around the world take form – Nessie, kappa, and the various cryptids that circulate on the internet. It is precisely because the space is so vast that visitors can feel it in their bodies: that a monster is not an alien thing arriving from outside reason, but the visible form of something already latent within us and within our society. We needed the end of the exhibition to be somehow spectacular.
Was there anything that surprised you working on this exhibition?
We tend to consider Tony a multimedia artist because of the technology that he uses, but he describes himself as “painting with colour”. He’s much more like a painter than a media artist who is focused on technology first. He’s more imaginative. He starts with the image and then uses this technology.
And he treats everyone as a team, even the technician who did a really small job – he acknowledges people.
This is Tony Oursler’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan. What connections or conversations did you want to create between his work and Japanese audiences? And what do you hope the general audience, especially the younger generation, will take away from the exhibition?
I hope Japanese audiences will discover, from a fresh angle, how the sensitivity to presence and to objects they already live with connects to the cutting edge of technology.
Through soliloquizing dummies, objects that speak to us, and voices dispersed into the environment, Oursler draws visitors not simply into the position of observer, watching a screen, but into the interior of the relationship the work generates.
One thing I hope audiences will take away is the recognition that technology and magic, science and belief, were never historically as cleanly separated as we assume – the boundary of rationality was never rigid, but has always been revised by new tools and instruments of observation by institutions.
For a generation that has grown up alongside AI, this may already feel as ordinary as the air they breathe. That is exactly why I hope encountering Oursler’s work gives the audience a moment of distance – a chance to look again at what invisible things they believe in, day to day, through the technology they use.
Tony Oursler: Between Technology and Spiritual Knowledge – Magic, Media, and Art
3rd July – 27th September 2026
Tokyo Node
All photos by Rachel Carvosso Mataraki
