With one sweep of his hand, Zbigniew Karkowski triggered a thundering crash and a blinding strobe light that caused more than a few of the hundred Japanese hipsters in attendance to jump in shock.
"We take technology to the point where it breaks, and then we keep using it," Karkowski, percussionist for Sensorband, featured artist at Tokyo's posh new Intercommunication Center art gallery, said later.
In perfect sync, the two other members of this avant-garde industrial performance group began to move subtly on their pedestals that stood bathed in blue light inside a hall of the ICC. As Atau Tanaka tensed his muscles, a low whine bled from the speakers. Edwin van der Heide "sang" by flexing his fingertips on handheld keys while Karkowski chopped at the air, creating a pulsing beat that sounded like a modem's handshake in slow motion. Cut-up video projections of a human torso, by collaborators Granular Synthesis, danced to the rhythm in spasmodic seizures.
Sunday night's performance by Sensorband and Granular Synthesis was the final event in the opening performance series at the Intercommunication Center, a high-tech art gallery funded by the advertising department of the Japanese giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation. The series began several weeks ago with performances and presentations by Stelarc, David Blair, Ingo Gunther, Yoshinori Tsuda, and Survival Research Laboratories, broadcast live on Japan's Perfect TV network.
Even with Survival Research Laboratories on the bill, Sensorband took the award for the loudest and most unnerving performance of the bunch.
Sensorband, which has played together since 1993 even though the members are frequently distributed across the globe, employs instruments of its own design. Karkowski's percussive beats are generated by breaking infrared beams surrounding him, Tanaka alters his audio onslaught with his very musculature via straps around his arms, and van der Heide generates and morphs synthesized sounds in real time with handheld joystick-like controllers.
But though the group has even performed remotely using ISDN connections, technology is only Sensorband's medium, not its message.
"The most important aspect of Sensorband is not new technology, but energy," said Karkowski. "We want to make a pure, primitive, direct connection to our audience by playing music with our bodies."
As the dazed Japanese audience wandered through Sensorband's hour-long digital barrage of beats and blasts, one could only wonder why a massive corporation like NTT would bankroll the avant-garde extreme.
"NTT has big money so they don't need to gain any profit from this," said Hisanori Gagota, assistant curator of the ICC. "NTT doesn't understand media art, but they know they should pay something back to the Japanese people. And this is one of the ways to do that."
And that's good enough for Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories, who along with telerobotic pioneer Eric Paulos operated a deadly air launcher in San Francisco with an Internet-connected track robot located at the ICC last week.
"The impression that I got from working with NTT is that they're bringing all these really unusual art things over here for arbitrary reasons," Pauline said. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be thankful for them."
