September 14 (Sat), 2024

Art in Country of Tokyo 2024 (AICOT 2024) is an art festival that will be held for the second time this year, featuring nearly 40 artists from six countries in Tokyo 23 Wards, Tama Area and Shikinejima. 

Time schedule
13:15 Open
13:30 - 14:30 Transcultures Screening Program "Transcultures sonic video selection"
14:45 - 15:30 Ko Nakajima & Takumi Harada
15:45 - 16:30 Inuhiko Yomata
16:45 - 17:30 Kohei Nakada
17:45 - 18:30 Paradise Now + Isa*Belle

*There are no chairs in the venue. Blue seats or standing are available.

Advance: 3000 yen 
Advance Pair ticket: 5000 yen
Same day: 3500 yen

*No cancellations or refunds will be accepted.


Video screening program by Transcultures (Belgium)

13:30 - 14:30
Transcultures Screening Program
"Transcultures sonic video selection"

Kika Nicolela / Visions of inside – Common Ground project / digital / 8min. 51sec. / 2020 / Brazil/Belgium

Alain Wergifosse / flux & densities / digital / 5min. / 2020 / Belgium

Glasz DeCuir / Renata K in Transonic Second Life / digital / 5min. 57sec. / 2021 / Spain

Christophe Bailleau featuring Paradise Now / 77 Affairs / digital / 6min. 18sec. / 2021 / Belgium

Christophe Bailleau / The Dream Caard / digital / 3min. 59sec. / 2022 / Belgium

Pastoral / No Lockdown Drift / digital / 5min. / 2020 / Belgium

Pastoral / Huba / digital / 6min. 25sec. / 2022 / Belgium

Gauthier Keyaerts / Ces riens essentiels#4 / digital / 3min. 19sec. / 2020 / Belgium

Régis Cotentin / Slyder  / digital / 7min. 30sec. / 2019 / France

Philippe Boisnard / Memory without memories / digital / 3min. 41sec. / 2024 / France

Thomas Israël / Tryptique Prototype / digital / 2min. 50sec. / 2020 / Belgium


≪The body is the most familiar environment, or rather the most familiar clock≫
Ko Nakajima & Takumi Harada / Video & Butoh

The death of video. To be alive is to be spinning. Moving properly 24 hours a day. This is a philosophical performance. Harada is dancing my soul. I show my soul through dance. It is a tribute to death. Harada takes on my soul, my soul takes on Harada, and Harada is the one who dances it. Therefore, death is my life that is close at hand. Without Harada, I would not have filmed the dance.


≪Reading Fire≫
Inuhiko Yomata / poetry reading

He read several poems from his poetry collections “My Purgatory” and “Renunciation of Fire”.


≪Improvisation: Dialogue≫
Kohei Nakada / Ambient music

It takes in all the external situation and creates a new sound. We interact with that sound and create a new sound again. 


Video screening program by Transcultures (Belgium)

≪Caressing the clouds≫
Paradise Now + Isa*Belle / Sound art performance

Each performance of sound/intermedia artist Paradise Now is a transonic and cinematic journey distilling a series of short films for the ears, vaporous landscapes punctuated with poetic fragments, field recordings (recordings made on the place of diffusion), haunting or disruptive grooves and harmonic/chromatic games. 

Using live electronic and guitar treatments, the voice (sung or spoken), Tibetan bowls and other vibrating sound objects, he constructs a band-dreamlike, hybrid and contrasting sound...sometimes solar, sometimes lunar but always sensitive and sensual.  

For this performance, Paradise Now invites its long-time partner, body artist and sound masseuse Isa*Belle (singing bowls, vibrating objects) to join him for this special suspended moment. 


Video screening program by Transcultures (Belgium)

≪Visions of inside – Common Ground project ≫
Kika Nicolela / digital / 8min. 51sec. / 2020 / Brazil/Belgium

Visions of inside is the first video made using the database of the Common Ground Project initiated by video artist and curator Kika Nicolela (Brazil/Belgium) in April 2020 in reaction to the Covid-19 crisis. It promotes the creation of a shared database of videos, sounds and texts by worldwide artists, reflecting on the multiple issues raised by the crisis and the lockdown. Above all, the Common Ground Project's goal is to collectively use creation as means of communion and resistance.

≪flux & densities≫
Alain Wergifosse / digital / 5min. / 2020 / Belgium

In a set of prisms, filters and mirrors, Alain Wergifosse (sound, visual and multimedia artist) offers some fragments of opto-mechanical treatments on pure light and on some digital images put into video feedback. These abstract images and electronic sounds come from a multi-channel video installation project in work in progress for the Vice Versa 2020-21 residency/exchange between Transcultures (Belgium) and La Chambre Blanche (Quebec).

≪Renata K in Transonic Second Life≫
Glasz DeCuir / digital / 5min. 57sec. / 2021 / Spain

Glasz DeCuir (Machinima director and screenplay writer) filmed and edited the images of the performance of Renata K (the experimental project of classical flutist Renata Kambarova, from Uzbekhistan) during the first edition of the Transonic Second Life Festival which took place in February 2021 at the Cat’s Club. A dive into cyber dunes where Renata K’s avatar wanders, in the sonic sirocco, under a cosmic firmament, to meet other intriguing creatures …

≪77 Affairs≫
Christophe Bailleau featuring Paradise Now / digital / 6min. 18sec. / 2021 / Belgium

From cemeteries to celestial spheres via our screens, various mutations are connected. the face-to-face and the distancial dimensions merge. The images and colors of our fantasized lives cross the border between real and virtual ... as in a dream or an endless nightmare. The connecting vibrations could perhaps bring some salvation ...

≪The Dream Caard≫
Christophe Bailleau / digital / 3min. 59sec. / 2022 / Belgium

“I am running, I am floating, I am flying: I am dreaming. The world unravels; his envelope disappears to reveal the void - the big mess. The sounds make us hope for a renewal. Darkness is everywhere but a path is opening… “I am not separating; I am just traveling”. 

≪No Lockdown Drift≫
Pastoral / digital / 5min. / 2020 / Belgium

Produced via connected exchanges during the first Covid-19 lockdown in Spring 2020 by the Pastoral (Christophe Bailleau and Philippe Franck) post pop duo, Lockdown Drift captures the expectation, the floating sensation but also the domestic reverie, the imaginary transfiguration and a form of sweet melancholy. The images and sounds that dialogue between the residences (both in Wallonia-Belgium) of the protagonists (Huy for Christophe Bailleau and Mons for Philippe Franck) all come from the interior spaces and their close surroundings. An invitation to cherish the living in these different forms (human, animal, mineral, celestial …) and its power-hope of creative metamorphosis. 

≪Huba≫
Pastoral / digital / 6min. 25sec. / 2022 / Belgium

From the evocation of an ancient Araratian goddess, Huba "mother of all the living", Pastoral (Christophe Bailleau + Philippe Franck) takes us on a trip between fleeting clarity and tenacious darkness, cloudy grayness and colorful snapshots... the pseudo shamanic dance-evocations fail to bringing humans out of their entrenched interiors…and yet Huba seems to have left her husband Theispas to his battles and storms to join the beating of inverted landscapes, compressed televisions and masked faces…and the sky finally turns blue orange.

≪Ces riens essentiels#4≫
Gauthier Keyaerts / digital / 3min. 19sec. / 2020 / Belgium

Ces riens essentiels (‘these essential nothings’) is an infinite work-in-progress, initiated during the lockdown. The journey actually started in 2018 when Gauthier Keyaerts (sound and interdisciplinary artist) was in Brittany, shooting images from the Ocean, the shore, lichens... He brought back this particular energy and feeling of spirituality (felt by French surrealist writer André Breton). It helped since March to focus on the essentials: family, body, nature (insects, trees, flowers…), love... this sublime chaos.

≪Slyder≫
Régis Cotentin / digital / 7min. 30sec. / 2019 / France

Slyder is a dreamlike dive where the organic energies meet with the digital fluxes; ‘A disorder wins the spirit of a survivor. The song of the chimeras of the past pushes him towards the blackness of his mental screen, but a surprise awaits him when he spots the vanishing point of his memory … mirroring as it mirrors the present … and the journey continues’.

≪Memory without memories≫
Philippe Boisnard / digital / 3min. 41sec. / 2024 / France

The black box of  Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001 A Space Odyssey is the symbol of the question of our humanity. Here this black box becomes the sign of the disappearance of man. This memory without memories is the result of the generation of an imagination nourished by our images, but which strangely does not retain any, substituting its reality for ours. a reflection on the four elements (water, earth, air and fire). 

≪Tryptique Prototype≫
Thomas Israël / digital / 2min. 50sec. / 2020 / Belgium

Triptyque Prototype is an enigma with an exploded temporality which allows cross readings, associative. Its protagonist (the Montreal dancer Marilyn Daoust on a choreography by Manon Oligny) is in tension between the doll or the android and the woman of flesh. This video filmed in Montreal in 2015, as part of the interdisciplinary performance project The Oracles (initiated by Productions Rhizome-Quebec in partnership with Transcultures-Belgium) was finalized in Brussels in Spring 2020 with a delicate minimalist piano and electronics’ soundtrack by Paradise Now. 

≪Transcultures sonic video selection≫

For several years, Transcultures (under the artistic direction of Philippe Franck, curator, producer, sound/intermedia artist) has supported, co-produced and distributed video works (creations) by Belgian and international visual and intermedia artists who all have a privileged link with sound. Of varied aesthetics, techniques and inspirations, these “non-video clips” (which escape the usual categories) in a short format take a poetic and sometimes offbeat look at our contemporaneity. Each work is a form of singular microcosm that takes us on a special journey, a drift, an adventurous exploration where sounds and images interact intimately and play with our perceptions. 

Philippe Franck

Transcultures - Centre for Digital and Sound Cultures (Belgium) - was created in 1996 to promote and develop the intersections between contemporary arts, society and technologies issues. It is historically the first Centre of this kind in Belgium also working with various international collaborations (in Europe, North America, Africa and now East Asia) 

In its various activities and festivals (City Sonic - international biennale of sound arts, Transnumériques  - biennale of digital cultures), Transcultures favors a transversal, relational and exploratory, nomadic and site specific approach.  

Transcultures is now based in the Franciscan Convent of Hautrage where residences, workshops, exhibitions, special events are organised.  Transcultures also develops arts/science relations in partnership with several international universities. 

Transcultures has also initiated the Transonic label dedicated to the diversity of sound arts. In its desire to associate reflection and research with creation and transmission, Transcultures has produced various sound, paper, hybrid and multimedia publications.