Ku-kan is pleased to present Trace of the Contact #02, a solo exhibition by Kazuyuki Miyamoto, who has been turning the relationship between environmental sound and the body into artistic work.

Miyamoto is an artist and researcher whose focus is the mutual relationship between soundscape and the body. Rather than treating environmental sounds as isolated, individual objects, the concept of soundscape reframes them as a single whole—a landscape of sound. At the same time, soundscape discourse and practice have often been premised on the assumption that “the observer does not produce sound.” Against this, Miyamoto deliberately creates situations in which “the human is both observer and actor,” attempting a kind of bodily dialogue with the environment.

For this exhibition, Miyamoto has investigated points within Ku-kan’s own floor where a certain amount of pressure causes the floorboards to creak, and has built a sound installation around the sounds produced there. By focusing on sounds co-sounded with the environment—Active Environmental Sounds—that arise through human action, including the sounds a person’s own body makes, the exhibition attempts to create a more active mode of soundscape experience.

In the moment a person produces a sound, we tend to fall into the illusion that we ourselves are the sole agent. But when movement and perception—or action and cognition—are grasped together, we notice that in the sound-event unfolding before us, agency is not located in the human alone, but distributed between the human and the environment. Not a simple interaction, but an interrelation—a relationship that is generated between the two. Through this exhibition, we hope visitors will pay attention to the small, subtle sounds around them, and experience how this shifts their own sense of self and their relationship to the environment.