Mika Tajima

Known for her artistic investigations into human regulatory and relational structures—both internal and external—Tajima’s multifaceted practice incorporates technology and data as well as traditional techniques to probe the aesthetic and perceptual complexities of contemporary life. From her early installation and performance work to more recent explorations in painting and sculpture, Tajima has developed series over the past several years that stimulate sensorial and psychic responses while activating theoretical approaches. Her work is guided by her enduring engagement with issues of agency and control.

Anchoring 37 Dimensions, Tajima’s new series 24 Hour Cosmos extends the ethos of her 2024 sculpture Sense Object (January 1, 2023, United States), a portrait of national sentiment across a single day created by analyzing social media data and compressing it within a 5d memory crystal. Amassing text-based datasets of news events from around the world, each 24 Hour Cosmos work aggregates data from one day and translates it into material abstraction, encoding it into the surface of the work to create a portrait of the day in shimmering luminescence, like a measurement of changing light from a camera’s long exposure. The word “cosmos” refers to the universe or a complex, orderly system, and these works are also subtitled for the days they reference. These ethereal wall-mounted pieces have varying holographic surfaces, measuring interconnected global events and moods as prismatic color and shifting visibility and luminosity that respond to the viewer’s positioning.

Like much of Tajima’s work, 24 Hour Cosmos is process-oriented, and in this case it employs photonics, optoelectronics, machine learning, and customized data analysis systems. In collaboration with technicians and engineers, the artist developed a machine that laser etches diffracted data points onto photopolymer film, taking up to 200 hours for each piece. Custom code employing analytics collects and transforms the entangled footprint of international news cycles into distinct clusters and point of light and color. In an age defined by big data and high-velocity digital life, the works reflect the dissonance between individual experience and the universal while also evoking the ephemeral, dynamic nature of humanity beyond data and the multiplicity of perspectives embedded in interwoven global events.

In their own way, these works speak to the radical experimentations of the California Light and Space artists—who have long been an important part of Pace’s history and program—while taking them further into the realm of networked information, sociality, and the self.