I saw an exhibition by Shohei Fujimoto yesterday that I liked, at Artechouse Houston, titled Intangible Forms. I was not familiar with his work, and came away thinking it was pretty interesting!
I believe this is a quasi-permanent (?) exhibition that opened in June 2024 with the opening of Artechouse Houston, and shows alongside whatever rotating exhibit they have. Some of the pieces were previously shown at the same-titled 2020 exhibition at Artechouse NYC and/or 2023 exhibition at Artechouse DC, while others are new.
The genre was a split between fully digital work I'd call "generative art" and a bunch of laser installations. A number of the laser installations are sculpture-like, with lasers that have enough perceived volume to look like kinetic sculpture. A few photos and videos I took below.
Laser sculpture
Something about the laser "sculptures", which he dubs the intangible series, makes them look to me like kinetic light sculptures with volume & mass, the kind you might find made of fiber optic tubes connected to motors. But they are just lasers. There were some smaller pieces with relatively limited motion that really looked like sculptures, but I mostly took videos of the largest piece that had more motion.
This one's entitled intangible #form (2024):
A close-up:
There is a bit near the end of the preprogrammed sequence that breaks the illusion by switching the lasers on and off, and then having them start moving in waves in a way that's almost realistic but a bit too violent to work if they were physical:
Other laser works
A very different laser-based piece looks like a mutant cathode ray tube, with lasers projected from the back at a non-uniform, semi-transparent piece of something that turns them into patterns. I'm not sure what exactly the "something" is made out of; it's described as simply "a hemispherical sculpture". It's slightly unnerving when viewed from the front, since the lasers are pointed more or less directly at your face (but they don't make it through the "hemispherical sculpture").
It's entitled power of one #distortion (2022):
And this one, data subsidence (2022), has lasers "drawing" on a circular board covered in phosphorescent paint:
Not shown here, but a clarification I appreciated on the placard accompanying a work involving lasers and one-way mirrors: "Both sides of the artwork operate on the same time axis".
Digital art
There were a number of pieces of purely digital generative art that I have fewer photos of. This one, #echo (2023), attempts to explore the idea of "latent space" in generative AI systems via a more traditional hand-crafted generative art system:
Excerpt from the placard blurb:
Inspired by contemporary AI's visualization of information, the overlapping of images draws inspiration from AI's structured data based on shared past recordings. Visual information produced by AI resembles intangible and latent memories, colliding within our perception, making us aware of their elusive nature. While #echo is inspired by AI, it doesn't utilize AI. Instead, it explores unique expressions arising from the collision of latent visual information using simple shapes. The goal is to create a sense of AI's pseudo-experiences, mirroring our perception's ephemeral and non-material entities.
Short video of one of the displays: