On Saturday, September 26, and Sunday, September 27, 2026, the 27th Annual Conference of the Japanian Society for Environmental Art (conference theme: “This Too Is Environmental Art”) was held at the Ueno Campus of Tokyo University of the Arts. In the oral presentation session on the first day of the conference, three members of the Murakami Laboratory—Minori Watanabe (Master’s Program), Ha Chau Bao Nhi (Doctoral Program), and Fumiaki Murakami (Associate Professor)—gave research presentations. Summaries of each presentation are as follows.

Contemporary Art as a Medium for Making Multiple Worlds

Presenter: Minori Watanabe (Master’s Program, Doctoral Program in Art and Design, Graduate School, University of Tsukuba)

This presentation discussed, from the perspective of Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, how contemporary art can express the “multiple worlds” held within an individual and how it can act upon what lies outside the work itself. “Multiple worlds” refers to the distinct experiences shaped by frameworks such as the individual, region, and culture, and the ways of perceiving things formed by them. In art, the diversity of worlds has mainly been expressed through frameworks such as region, race, and gender, but this presentation focuses on the “world” at the level of the individual.

As a case study, the presenter took up the project Releasing Secrets, which she has been developing since 2024. In this work, anonymously collected “secrets” from various people are laser-engraved onto stones picked up from the ground, and the stones are then returned to the places where they were found. This work transposes the psychological and personal act of confessing a secret onto an archaeological and geological scale, corresponding to what Goodman calls “deformation” among the ways of worldmaking. The secret is transformed from an emotional confession into a trace left for the future, giving rise to the possibility of easing the pain of currently holding a secret. Because what one considers “a secret worth leaving for the future” reveals the contours of each individual’s world, the presenter concluded that the work becomes a medium that transforms the nature of secrets to construct new worlds, and can evoke “multiple worlds” in both viewers and participants.

Keywords: secrets, multiple worlds, Nelson Goodman

Bricolaging Media: Vietnamese Media Art and Japanese Device Art as Reference Points

Presenter: Ha Chau Bao Nhi (Doctoral Program, Doctoral Program in Art and Design, Graduate School, University of Tsukuba)

This presentation clarified, with Japanese device art as a reference point, the process by which Vietnamese media artists have developed “bricolage” (Lévi-Strauss)—making things from whatever materials and tools are at hand—as a method of production. Unlike Western DIY culture, which implies resistance to consumer society, bricolage in Vietnam arose out of necessity: the repurposing of wartime materials, postwar shortages, and an ongoing lack of equipment that continues today. The presenter argued that what began as a survival strategy gradually transformed into a conscious artistic method. The presenter also proposed the hypothesis that Vietnam’s orientation toward hardware stems from a culture of repairing and reusing secondhand electronic devices imported from countries such as Japan during an era of embargo and material shortage.

From semi-structured interviews with nine media artists, as well as on-site observation of exhibitions and studio visits, three characteristics were extracted: “presenting materials without concealment,” “incorporating culture through the body,” and “collaborating among artists to handle hardware.” While this overlaps with device art in that the device itself becomes the means of expression, the processes that give rise to the two are diametrically opposed. In Vietnam, constraints were not something to be overcome but became the very source of a distinctive method. This presentation offered a perspective for reconsidering media art not in terms of the richness of equipment but in terms of the originality of method, directed toward practices in Vietnam and, by extension, Southeast Asia.

Keywords: bricolage, device art, Vietnamese media art

AI and Ecology: Examples of Artistic Practice Concerning the Dismantling of Spectacle

Presenter: Fumiaki Murakami (Associate Professor, Faculty of Art and Design, University of Tsukuba)

This presentation diagnosed the social backlash against AI that has become apparent in the United States as a revolt against what Guy Debord called “spectacle,” and positioned contemporary ecological art practices by Pierre Huyghe and others as a “dismantling”—strictly speaking, an implosion (détournement)—of spectacle. The theoretical framework adopted Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, treating AI as an actant that crosses the human and the nonhuman. Here, “ecology” does not refer to ecology that treats nature as an object, but to a mode of relation that does not presuppose the “Great Divide” between the human and the nonhuman.

Environmental protests surrounding data centers, as well as situations in which artists themselves become training material, show that AI is beginning to be experienced not as a neutral tool but as a totalizing system that extracts, conceals, and separates. In response, the works of Huyghe and others do not reject AI, but rather reweave its operations into a living assemblage exposed to metabolism and contingency. For example, in UUmwelt, images generated by an artificial neural network are fed back into an environment composed of flies, dust, and environmental sensors, rematerializing the illusion of an autonomous and sublime appearance. This presentation described such dismantling as five operations corresponding to the constitutive elements of spectacle, locating the agent of critique not in the analyst but in the operations of the work itself. It further showed that, in contrast to the infrastructural and political opacity that regulation and mapping can address, art’s distinctive role lies in acting upon the perceptual and ontological layers that such measures cannot reach, and in reconfiguring the perception that underlies politics.

Keywords: AI, ecology, spectacle

Abstracts of each presentation are included in Environmental Art 37 (Digital Edition) (Japanian Society for Environmental Art, published September 20, 2026).