Daito Manabe x ELEVENPLAY^JP

Daito Manabe is an artist, programmer, and composer whose work explores how life, intelligence, and society emerge, through music, computation, and audiovisual media. After founding Rhizomatiks in 2006, he has developed works combining programming, music, visual art, and performance.

His early research investigated feedback between the human body and machines by transforming motion, muscle activity, and physiological signals into sound and images. His practice later expanded to cultured neural networks, brain organoids, and spiking neural networks, treating biological activity itself as a generative medium.

His current research focuses on societies composed of humans, artificial life, and AI agents, exploring how interaction, adaptation, and emergence can become new methods for generating music and moving images.

Moving between research and practice, he presents work through large-scale performances, museum installations, and public artworks. For the Tokyo Handover Ceremony at the Closing Ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, he led technology development, visual systems, and lighting systems. He continues to collaborate with artists including Perfume, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Björk, Nosaj Thing, and Squarepusher.

ELEVENPLAY is a dance company established in 2009 by director and choreographer MIKIKO, founded with the wish to cultivate dancers who embody mind, technique, and body alongside a refined artistic sensibility. Comprised entirely of female dancers, the company pursues physical expression across stage, video, and still photography.

Through an ongoing collaboration with Rhizomatiks Research, ELEVENPLAY has produced numerous works that interrogate the boundaries between body and technology, the real and the virtual. border, which combines VR headsets with autonomously moving mobility devices to let audiences move between virtual and physical space themselves, received an Honorary Mention in Ars Electronica's STARTS Prize in 2021.

The company has performed in more than 30 cities and has been invited to festivals in Japan and abroad, including Sónar Festival, Festival Internacional Cervantino, MUTEK Mexico, MUTEK Montréal, and Gray Area Festival. In January 2018 it presented Rhizomatiks Research x ELEVENPLAY US TOUR 2018 "things", followed in April by ELEVENPLAY x Rhizomatiks Research x Kyle McDonald NORTH AMERICAN TOUR 2018 "discrete figures", among other highlights of its ongoing activity. This marks ELEVENPLAY's second appearance at MUTEK.JP.

Key Credits:
Direction, Music, Video Direction: Daito Manabe
Direction, Choreography: MIKIKO (ELEVENPLAY)
Performance: ELEVENPLAY

Daito Manabe x ELEVENPLAY — +1+1+1+

"+1+1+1+" is a dance installation by media artist Daito Manabe and dance company ELEVENPLAY, led by MIKIKO. Taking time and structure as its theme, it layers the dancers' bodies, projected imagery, light and shifting frames over a foundation of classical musical structure and the repetition of contemporary rhythm.

Through a stage space that repeatedly synchronises and desynchronises, the work reconfigures the boundaries between body and technology, music and dance. It received its world premiere in 2024, as part of the opening commemorative programme for the mid-size hall at Aubade Hall Toyama.