Born in 1983 in Tokyo, Aki Inomata grew up in a “forest of concrete buildings.” She found respite at her elementary school, which was located on a verdant college campus, “a precious place where I could contact various creatures, such as red dragonflies and crickets,” she recalled. This childhood spent between urban grays and pockets of green came to inform the two entwined realms of Inomata’s artistic practice, which combines human technology and nonhuman actors to probe the creative possibilities of interspecies collaboration.
As a student at Tokyo University of the Arts, Inomata was already experimenting with ways to conjure natural elements in urban environments through sound pieces and digital projections, a layering of real and artificial spaces inspired (borrowed scenery). Mounted in unorthodox settings like tents and back streets, Kara’s productions melded the stage and the actual exterior world. “However, I gradually began to have doubts about the fact that my works could be just a simulation,” Inomata reflected. “I felt that I was reproducing the sense of stagnation of information society, where everything is controlled by computers.”
