The 2025 CCBT artist fellows Ueda Maki, Kishi Yuma, Doi Itsuki, Fujishima Sacco, and Yamauchi Shota introduce their projects about this year’s theme of the Future Commons. With SIDE CORE, a 2022 artist fellow who is also presenting a special exhibition at CCBT, as moderator, they discuss the role that collaboration between artists and other creatives and a future CCBT can play in society.
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“
What is the unknown? Starting from that question, this project envisages new forms of human-to-humanoid communication that do not rely on conventional linguistic frameworks. Intended as an outdoor installation, the project provides encounters with the unknown—that is, encounters with a new nature. The process of producing the project is also made publicly accessible through demonstrations and lectures by the artist. From envisioning the unknown future, the project fosters an imagination capable of creating the commons to come.
