TONE

An artist, interaction designer, programmer and DJ born in 1976, Tokyo. Graduate from the Department of Mathematics, Tokyo University of Science, and the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS).

Manabe launched Rhizomatiks in 2006. Since 2015, he has served alongside Motoi Ishibashi as co-director of Rhizomatiks Research, the firm’s division dedicated to exploring new possibilities in the realms of technical and artistic expression with a focus on R&D-intensive projects. 

Manabe’s works take a new approach to everyday materials and phenomena. His ultimate goal is not simply rich, high-definition realism by recognising and reassembling these familiar elemental building blocks. Rather, his practice is informed by careful observation to discover and elucidate the essential potentialities inherent in the human body, data, programming, computers, and other phenomena, thus probing the interrelationships and boundaries delineating the analogue and digital, real and virtual.

A stage designer and choreographer, MIKIKO has established her own artistic direction and choreographed for almost 50 world-famous Japanese artists like Perfume, BABYMETAL, Ringo Shiina and more. She has won many awards in the performing arts field, and her choreography has been widely appreciated in the Japanese Pop scene. It is safe to say that MIKIKO is one of the greatest choreographers in Japan.

A dance company founded in 2009 with choreographer and art director, MIKIKO at the helm, ELEVENPLAY strives to nurture dancers with strong artistic sense and creativity on top of exquisite techniques, body and spirit. The company consists of female dancers from various genres, its works taking on diverse forms of expression from stage, video to still photograph.

Since its founding in 2006, Rhizomatiks has been a creative collective that explores the relationship between people and technology and develops a variety of expressions using media technologies.

What makes the collective unique is that they go beyond the realm of so-called "media art" to include elements ranging from research and development, as can be seen in visual design or visualisation of vast amounts of data, to business, architecture, advertising, and entertainment, all of which having an impact on society. 

Just like the rhizome from which their name is derived, they are bound by a cross-sectional and horizontal rather than a hierarchical relationship, between mutually unrelated heterogeneous entities. This diversity of activities is made possible by the fact that they are a full-stack collective of artists, designers, programmers, architects and researchers working comprehensively from ideation, hardware/software development to operation.