On April 4th, 2014 Frantic Gallery from Tokyo and Berlin based Das Foto Image Factory will open “Digit((al) (/)Sound(/)Image)(.)” and will present their viewpoint on the present and possible future of technology-related art and its relationship with the media it is recorded, saved and transmitted with. Makoto Sasaki and Macoto Murayama ― two Japanese artists strongly bound with cutting edge digital imaginary ― will show their perspective on futuristic urban landscapes and post-organic flora, captured and transformed with the latest technologies. Sasaki uses digital photography to grasp urban landscapes with motion and color in the way a Megalopolis is re-coded in flattened cyberpunk scores of fluorescent pulse and multi-directed light-traces. Murayama researches a structure of plants and recreates them in digital 3-dimensional diagrams, rebuilding an organic form in the way the image of its post-human mechanical nature comes to the fore.

Recorded and saved in numeric ways, images of these artists as they look into the future in terms of content and the technology that is used to create them, are brought into the material world by “Das Foto Image Factory” printing company. For several years Frantic Gallery has collaborated and spent long hours in conversations with our colleagues from “Das Foto” to find the best way not only to record and preserve, but to use the printing technology in a way it can reinforce aesthetic/digital qualities of the image. The Image Factory is the place where The Digital ― understood also in a broader sense as Immaterial, Inorganic, Artificial ― of Sasaki and Murayama is transformed from binary code and a software body into the substance of paper, while carefully upholding each fraction of Sasaki’s color-lines/each measurement figure of Murayama and reinforcing their other-worldly character and bodiless (anti-)presence. “Das Foto” is a space with machines that provide the material base for the works of the presented artists and where visitors of the show will be able to witness the process and moment of a Digit turning into Matter. The Factory which burns Murayama and Sasaki’s digital images onto paper, giving them physical presence will become a showroom for the works of these artists for two months with the “Digit((al) (/)Sound(/)Image)” Exhibition, while revealing the intricate relationship between digital works of art and its media.

From the opposite of the Image Factory side (=the side where Image enters its substance) we invite Stefan Goldmann, a person active in the field of Sound and its techno-metamorphoses. Goldmann’s interest lies in the junction of sound and its technological paraphernalia, in urge to understand how audible content is recorded, saved, distributed and in what way the progress of these techniques and technologies transforms into aesthetic parameters capable of shaping music itself. While visitors of the show will be able to see the printing machines in process of shaping digital image, a music performance of Goldmann will let you hear the way recording machines bring to life and shape digital sound. In this way we would like to try to expose the futuristic ambitions of works by Sasaki and Murayama in the Image Factory as well as the Factory of Sound, where Goldmann presents his excursion through 140 years of music media while playing with the technologies and revealing their aesthetics-infusing powers. The ”historical” DJ set will be performed by Goldmann ( in the midst of printing devices and exhibited visual art works ) during the opening reception and will be available online after the start of the exhibition, offering our guests permanent access to both, the audio and visual dimensions.
Between Tokyo and Berlin, Art and Science, Future and Past, Message and it’s Media “Digit((al) (/)Sound(/)Image)(.)” exhibition offers you the research and experience of those paths image and sound so defining for the start of the 21st century moves from its initial state to media that shapes it, from technological processes to the final presence of the work of art in its Digital Age.