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TAKAMINE Tadasu: The SUPERCAPACITOR
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Published: September 26 2008

Copyright © 2008 ARATANIURANO

Having graduated from the Kyoto City University of Arts in 1991, Tadasu Takamine soon won the honorable mention award at the 2nd Sony Music Art Artist Audition in 1993, and from 1993 to 1997 he was one of the members of Dumb Type. Thereafter, he studied Media Art at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS).

An internationally renowned artist, he is continuously invited to hold exhibitions abroad, and in 2002, he was invited to the 50th Venice Biennale to show his work "God Bless America", an ironic video installation depicting two tons of oil clay. Takamine employs a diverse range of media, including installation, video, performance, and others. In recent years he has been working on composing and choreographing his own theater pieces, further expanding the breadth of his practice.

The one constant issue that Takamine has been addressing since the beginning of his artistic career is how to suggest a certain "something" that reveals the varied faces of human existence, lived in the face of contradiction, and which has in turn been combined with his own physicality. In this exhibition, Takamine takes up the theme of our idealized electrical storage system, the "electric double layer capacitor" (supercapacitor).

Already, with Masdar City, a city in Abu Dhabi being built to run entirely on renewable energy sources, and the emergence of a global trend towards the rejection of dependence on fossil fuels, more and more attention is being paid to supercapacitors and how their ability to store large amounts of electricity will be key to our upcoming transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. A durable, harmless and low-cost device for the storage of electricity is humanity's dream. The technology is right there in front of us, and if we are able to make it spread, it will change the world.

However, the price of this technology remains an obstacle. Capacitors are expensive, and yet the raw materials from which they are made are extremely cheap. One has to question why the price is so high.

In this exhibition, Takamine experiments with making a brand of these enigmatic supercapacitors, and we believe that visitors will be fascinated to see how his new work expresses his desire for the spread of this technology.

*All text provided by ARATANIURANO

Last Updated on July 12 2008
 

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