FESTIVAL/TOKYO

About

CHAOS*LOUNGE, leading creators of the decade's art

CHAOS*LOUNGE is a unit that gathers artists for work centering on the Internet. Since 2010 it has organized a
range of concerts and exhibitions with Uso Fujishiro and Yohei Kurose as curators, invited controversy for its
critical look at contemporary art history.

In 2010 it held the "Chaos*Lounge 2010: Takahashi Collection Hibiya" exhibition, representing the world of online
characters up till then never seen in the art world, and invited their makers to the gallery. For its second exhibition
it created "Destruction*Lounge", a project involving "geeks" occupying the venue to play and display their unique
eco-system. In 2011 the group made a drama series with a fictional character created online, Tomonori Arakawa, as the protagonist, broadcast over the Internet, and exhibited at Tokyo Wonder Site. Along with demonstrating the
abnormal lifestyle in the "geek house" shared residence of the characters, the project represented Japan's unusual Internet and otaku subcultures, and their communal identity, as well as the possibilities of online streaming as a
form of artistic expression.

Its other work includes projects crossing over into the world of practical design and art, including participation in
the interior decoration of 3 rooms at the Chaos*Sunline hotel in Kamata, as well as collaborations with fashion
brands.

Post-March 11's "Character Culture"

The post-war Japanese entertainment industries of TV and cinema anime, manga comics and video games reflected their era and society, and achieved great success. With this new work CHAOS*LOUNGE will turn their attention to
Japan's symbolic, unusual "character culture", taking on the artistic context of its history and aiming to present it as
a media that mediates social and shared memory and the unconscious.

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami have left a great wound on Japanese society and so much has been lost. Following the "grand narrative" of this unprecedented catastrophe, how possible is it for Japan's character culture
to respond to the events of 3.11?

The title refers to ostracism, to wanderers. The stage is Tokyo's Akihabara, the sacred site for modern Japanese
character pop culture and an area that has recently been prospering like a theme park. In this space, where post-
earthquake time seems to have stopped, CHAOS*LOUNGE will search for new paths with their countless characters.