Casts of hands, arms and legs appear scattered around Meiro Koizumi’s studio in Yokohama in preparation for Art Week Tokyo, some of them attached to disparate objects, such as wooden chairs or metal engine parts. In mid-September, the artist was in full production of a new work, Altars of Prometheusa sculptural coda to its virtual reality Prometheus Trilogywhich explored “how we can use technology, rather than being used by it”.

The myth of Prometheus, condemned to eternal punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity, inspired Koizumi to explore issues related to technological progress. In his previous series of works, VR headsets immerse the viewer in the experience of living with a fatal motor neurone disease (Prometheus Bound2019), being a migrant worker (Unbound Prometheus2021), and merging into a collective body (Prometheus, the bringer of fire2023).

Koizumi’s new project is consciously more material than his previous focus on time-based media. The sculptures evoke Giorgio de Chirico’s mannequins and Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 sci-fi horror film. Tetsuo: The Iron Manin which a Japanese employee begins to sprout metal appendages. Koizumi also sees his move from video to objects in relation to philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s ideas on artificial intelligence and the “reality of the virtual”.

Striving to understand the essence of humanity is a recurring aspect of Koizumi’s practice. His earlier work on kamikaze pilots, for example, questioned the role of national culture and the formation of the self. Academic Ayelet Zohar of Tel Aviv University describes Koizumi’s extensive work on war memory as asking “whether the value of Japan’s postwar economic miracle – measured at the cost of emotional, psychological repression , social and political, of oblivion, of obscurity and oblivion” … it was worth it.

While the Prometheus Trilogy weighed the benefits and possible dangers of the technology, Altars of Prometheus addresses artificial intelligence as a path to dystopia. According to Koizumi, “AI can only process the parts of us that can be put into data, which means that the parts of us that cannot be encrypted will be left behind. » The installation will premiere at the Mujin-to Production gallery, a renovated 80-year-old wooden building located in the historically working-class neighborhood of Sumida-ku.

• Meiro Koizumi: Altars of Prometheus, Mujin-to Production, 5-10-5 Kotobashi, Sumida-ku, November 5-December 15