Atau Tanaka
Atau Tanaka (JP) is an artist-developer for musical interfaces.
Atau Tanaka [2000 © Jan Sprij]
Atau Tanaka is an artist-developer, who bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research, creating interactive music pieces for concert performance, fixed interactive media, and network.
Atau creates sensor-based musical instruments for performance, and is known for his work with biosignal interfaces. Physical interfaces are his instruments, and the network is a natural space for this music. His performances use corporeal gesture to articulate music and sound synthesis and real time image transformation. He seeks to harness collective musical creativity in mobile environments, seeking out the continued place of the artist in democratized digital forms. He has performed, solo or in collaboration (e.g. Sensorband, S.S.S.), in Europe, North America, and Japan, and his work has been presented at Ars Electronica, SFMOMA, Eyebeam, V2, ICC, and ZKM and has been mentor at NESTA.
He lives between the U.S., Europe, and Japan. This transcultural perspective is reflected as his artistic activities move from concert to installation to recorded media, from acoustic to electronic to experimental. He worked at IRCAM, was Artistic Ambassador for Apple France, and researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris; he was Artistic Co-Director of STEIM in Amsterdam, and he is the Chair for Digital Media at the Culture Lab Newcastle.
In 2000, he published in the context of V2_'s Machine Times, the essay Speed of Sound.
