Adachi Tomomi is a performer, composer, sound poet, instrument builder, and visual artist. Known for his versatile style, he has performed his own voice and electronics pieces, sound poetry, improvised music and contemporary music works and also presented site-specific compositions, compositions for classical instrumental ensembles, and choir pieces for untrained musicians around the world, including Tate Modern (London, UK), MaerzMusik (Berlin, Germany), Hamburger Bahnhof Museum (Berlin, Germany), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France) and Poesiefestival Berlin (Germany). He uses a wide range of materials in his work, including self-made physical interfaces and instruments, artificial intelligence, brain waves, artificial satellite, Twitter texts, fractures, and even paranormal phenomena.

Adachi presents an intermedia space which is composed of the acts of seeing, reading, listening to and touching texts using audio, visual, hologram and 3D printing in the Contemporary Art exhibition.

For Aichi Triennale 2022’s Performing Arts program, Adachi will direct John Cage’s late work, Europeras 3 & 4. Adachi will also present a solo performance of sound poetry.

• Adachi Tomomi Website

Selected Works & Awards

2021

Grand Prize for the opera Romeo will juliet, Agency for Cultural Affairs National Arts Festival – Music Division (Kansai section), Japan

2019

Award of Distinction, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria

2012

Invited Composer of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Berlin, Germany

2009

ACC Music Grant, New York, USA

2007

Europera 5 (Japan premiere), Suntory Summer Festival, Tokyo, Japan

Exhibition

Adachi Tomomi, a composer of vocal performances, often uses a technique in which the sound of his voice captured by a microphone is acoustically transformed using a system that tracks his own gestures. In doing so, he focuses on the vocal aspect, rather than the semantic aspect, of poetry, referencing the history of sound poetry. In addition to performing, Adachi also makes his own instruments and creates sound installations. While based in Germany, he has presented his work all over Europe at venues including Tate Modern, the Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart, and Centre Pompidou. At this festival, Adachi will direct John Cage’s Europeras 3 & 4, present a solo performance, and mount an installation in an exhibition room at the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art.

Adachi explores the latent potential of characters through 3D prints suspended from the ceiling, a huge digital drawing on the walls, images and a hologram unfolding in a cube-shaped screen. His 3D prints show the possibility that characters-which up to now have been printed on flat surfaces due to technical constraints-can extend in a third dimension; in other words, the possibility that characters can be transformed from something that is seen to something that can be physically touched. In his digital drawing displayed on a 2D plane, the word “Silence” is deafeningly repeated. This reminds us that conventional letters and characters are sets of lines that form shapes, and when they are combined they indicate meaningful sounds. The texts that appear as a hologram in the cube-shaped screen are a reference to the pioneers of sound poetry, the Russian avant-garde and Japanese MAVO poets of the first half of the twentieth century. On the screen is projected Adachi’s own performance interpreting these poems as they emerge three- dimensionally.

• Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2022
• MAVOtek Part V, 2022
• Photo: ToLoLo studio

• Courtesy of the artist

• Photo: Christopher Felver