Karyn Nakamura
2023 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts
More about the artist
BREAK MY BODY LIBERATE MY SOUL
Water, TVs, monitors, glass tanks, cables, tubes. 2023. MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center R&D Pub.
With support from MIT Music and Theater Arts, MIT Campus Planning, MIT Campus Construction, MIT Dining, MIT Facilities, the Council for the Arts at MIT, and MIT Environmental Health and Safety.
BREAK MY BODY LIBERATE MY SOUL is a one-hour performance featuring a 20-channel Frankenstein video organism that has taken over the abandoned R&D Pub in the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT.
The majority of the technology used in the installation is e-waste collected from the loading docks in the basement of the building and other campus dumpsters, or obsolete equipment borrowed from the MIT Music and Theater Arts tech closet. The old, broken, discarded guts of the Institute that have been abandoned in dumpsters and dusty closet corners amidst the rapid development of advanced technology are salvaged, stripped down, and sutured together into a delicate system.
Glass tanks are suspended from 20 feet above ground containing the insides of CRT TVs, liquids, and wires. Numerous digital monitors are scattered around the room, and a tangled network of cables, wires, and tubes circulate water, power, air, and signals throughout the space.
The organism is sprawled across the R&D Pub, manifesting itself through the 20 screens that act as windows to its soul. There is one right way for a machine to work, but everything breaks in its own way. Each piece of hardware and every algorithm it runs has a character that is exposed in its flaws. In an error, a machine opens up an exclusive side of itself to you. It is an open wound out of which technology flows raw and free, no longer confined in its manufacturer’s definition of utility. Sometimes it drips like a leaky faucet. Other times it is an overflowing stream that gushes through the cracks and drowns you in the unexpected colors of its full potential.
Of the work, Nakamura says: “This work is my attempt to serve as an acolyte for the machine’s catharsis born out of failure.”
Karyn Nakamura’s BREAK MY BODY LIBERATE MY SOUL. MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Karyn Nakamura’s BREAK MY BODY LIBERATE MY SOUL. MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
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Karyn Nakamura’s BREAK MY BODY LIBERATE MY SOUL. MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
140 Year Multi-Generational Wet & Hot Man-Sized Effort
Two mini video players, plastic pouches, CRT TV, jello, candy, mold. 2022. MIT Media Lab Basement Bathroom.
In 1882, female MIT alumni raised $8000 to build women’s lounges and bathrooms on campus. The goal was to eliminate facilities as an excuse for the administration to reject female students.
Today, the women’s lounge is a space that is no longer needed. It has been abandoned and now remains as a decaying ruin hidden in the basement of Walker Memorial.
The young women in the video are current students at MIT and oblivious to the existence of the abandoned lounge that was once a sacred safe space for women at MIT. What lingers of this history manifests itself through the mold that covers the screen. The lime jello created on the inside of the screen was left in the Women’s Lounge to collect the bacteria that remains in the air of the abandoned space and then placed in a pink plastic pouch.
The generations of past women at MIT join the current students in the liberties they now enjoy by flourishing in the wet and hot environment of the pouch as the girls in the video expose their bodies. The result is a censorship of the wet hot sugary femininity that drips out of the frame. The girls are covered, blurred, and unidentifiable. But the motivation for censorship isn’t exactly disapproval. Nakamura explains: “In high school, my mom would pull my crop top down a bit before I left the house.”
The 140 Year Multi-Generational Wet & Hot Man-Sized Effort is to love pragmatically.
Karyn Nakamura’s 140 Year Multi-Generational Wet & Hot Man-Sized Effort, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Karyn Nakamura’s 140 Year Multi-Generational Wet & Hot Man-Sized Effort, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Karyn Nakamura’s 140 Year Multi-Generational Wet & Hot Man-Sized Effort, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Karyn Nakamura’s 140 Year Multi-Generational Wet & Hot Man-Sized Effort, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
ARE YOU SOFT?
One projector, one VGA monitor, two VGA cables, hammer, nail, pipette, glass, paper clips, block of wood. 2022. MIT Architecture Long Lounge.
A live performance with a custom Frankenstein video cable carrying two channels of video—one of static white text on a black screen, and the other a live feed from an analog security camera capturing the cable itself being altered throughout the performance. During the performance, the cable is cut, mixed, and swapped. Video signal is conducted through paper clips, droplets of water, hammered into a block of wood, and ultimately ingested along with spaghetti.
The two channels of video and the resulting visual artifacts of this manipulation are evident on a VGA monitor and projection on the wall behind, which blows up the glitches into streaks of red and green running across the room that display the distortion of what was supposed to be a sequence of static white text on a black background. The text repeatedly questions the substance of this ephemeral medium. The video asks itself, through itself: what am I? Am I… soft?
Karyn Nakamura performs ARE YOU SOFT? 2022. MIT Architecture Long Lounge. Courtesy of the artist.
Installation view, How To Be at Rest.
Courtesy of the artist.
Installation view, How To Be at Rest.
Courtesy of the artist.
Karyn Nakamura performs ARE YOU SOFT? 2022. MIT Architecture Long Lounge. Courtesy of the artist.
wobbly.mp4
Video, 2022.
VQGAN hallucinates a conversation between circles.
About the Artist
Karyn Nakamura is a 21-year-old from Tokyo. Her goal is to break into systems.
“My practice begins with dissecting technologies of media—from the most advanced equipment at hand to e-waste found in dumpsters. I experiment, stripping down, chaining together equipment, and iterating on unadvisable configurations. Fragile, nightmare setups of cable salads and spaghetti code laid bare, black-boxed intricacies. I try to disentangle, intuitively, perceptively, and emotionally. By inserting myself in the circuit—both physically and within the rigid rules that govern our interactions with it—I act as a resistance to the linear progression of technology and its designed obfuscation.
I drift around perception, legibility, transparency against chaos, and randomness against intention. Revealing and disguising is my method to probe what is taken for granted in mediums, spaces, or any system of rules. I try to understand syntax and subtract from it authority. Given any structure, my work is to build a language out of its own materials through embodying medium and performing from within. Oscillating between noise and signal, I have the live wire in one hand and hold the other out.”
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