Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa uses various media — video, installation, recording and live performances — in order to produce stunning audio-visual sound pieces which he has been pioneering and presenting internationally since 1999. He describes his works as time-based sculptures and considers sound and image as a single unit. His works are literally compositions — symphonies of sounds imagined and produced as well as recorded — that, in combination with video material and computer generated aesthetics, change how the spectator views the familiar.

Whether the recordings of waterfalls obliterate into white noise while simultaneously forming an almost spiritual and reverential stillness around the viewer, or whether field recordings in combination with computer generated structures like glitch minimalism coexist in harmony in an un-harmonious terrifying world of war and destruction: Ryoichi Kurokawa invents and presents an audiovisual language where complexity and simplicity alternate and combine in a fascinating synthesis.

One of Kurokawa’s key realizations as part of the 54th Venice Biennale, was the immersive audiovisual sculpture ‘Octfalls’, commissioned for the exhibition “One of a Thousand Ways to Defeat Entropy.” In 2010, his work “rheo: 5 horizons” won the Ars Electronica Golden Nica, Prix Ars Electronica, in the category Digital Musics & Sound Art.

Kurokawa has exhibited and performed at various international art institutions and festivals including at Tate Modern, London; the 54th Venice Biennale, Arsenale Novissimo, Venice; transmediale, Berlin; Center for Fine Arts, Brussels; Espace Louis Vuitton, Paris; eARTS, Shanghai; MACBA, Barcelona.