I think my whole practice is about trying to sublimate all of my experience and life into making the work that I do.

There's so many parts of our lived experience that are not describable through words or other means.

And so having, you know, my work function in this way, that it could like, express, our lives even in the smallest way.

That's kind of my purpose in making my work is like to try to express something that maybe words aren't enough for.

You.

My name is Mika Tajima.

And this is how art changed me.

One of my earliest exposures to art was a very small, moment where I remember I was probably like 3 or 4 years old, and I was trying to draw a cat and becoming very frustrated by it, not looking like a cat at all.

And then my mother showing me that I could actually do a rubbing from a ruler or something I had, and it was like a sort of, like, miraculous way to produce an image without actually having to draw something.

So maybe that was like my first foray into, like, mechanical production of images or something like that.

My family is full of scientists.

My parents are both, scientists.

And my brother also studied physics.

So so I was really different in this household.

But my father always sort of said that, physics and art are basically the same types of practice.

And I've come to sort of like, really, appreciate that.

If physics is like the study of matter and it's motion behavior through time and space, I kind of connect that with my work, thinking about how that connects with the social.

I think the idea of identity is really, something part of my practice, the experience of the complexity of how one's identity is formed or the complexity of like, how we live in the world and how we experience things.

And so a lot of my works have explored, the physical built environment.

And that's both like architecture and design, but also, now it's like includes like technology as this kind of invisible infrastructure that sort of shapes everything around us, including like our art, our minds and our our emotions.

I think most of my work is, a kind of expression of looking for a way to understand my own experience.

And there are these, massive size, negative entropy works, which are these the woven acoustic portraits.

I thought of this during the beginning of the Covid pandemic, where everybody was sort of, like locked in isolation and everything suddenly went online.

And the only ways, like, we could really connect to other people.

Everything was online.

And so there's a way that which our lives like, existed in the fragility of our physicality and the sort of like isolation that we felt in that time of living like online, even though ostensibly that's like what's connecting us to other people.

And then feeling so, maybe very small, in this time where everything became about big numbers and, big data and things like that.

So I had this idea to try to express like, the infinite possibility of, like a human, human potential, by making these massive woven acoustic portraits, the Negative entropy series I wanted to weave, the tiny little blip of brain activity energy into this massive architectural size woven acoustic portrait.

So that was like sort of a symbol of this tiny little thing that you could never see becoming this like, you know, huge, massive scale artwork.

And then in front of that was a, a memory crystal, which was like this little tiny disk that it's like the most advanced way of archiving, massive amounts of data.

And so I was able to capture all of the tweets of all of the United States on January 1st of 2023.

So it's millions of people sort of like emotional text based, output.

And that was like compress on this tiny little disk that was facing this massive, brainwave energy pattern of one person says, like one tiny, like one person becoming big and the millions becoming this, like, tiny small thing.

So something I thought is like a way of me trying to, like, reflect on the experiences that we all contend with now on a daily basis.

It's sort of like, you know, a shift in scale, the discordant feeling of physical life and then other forms of our lives out in the digital realm.

So I brought these two books, The Principles of Soldier To and then The Book of Flowers.

So get to ikebana, which is like a branch of, like a school that I study.

I love this idea of flower arranging as a practice of, trying to create the universe in three small, floral elements that can include flowers or anything.

You can make an arrangement out of anything.

But.

So I was I think about this like, sort of like concepts, in this practice, as an idea of, like, looking at something that's constantly transforming.

So like, I did this, this experiment doing where I sort of give flowers a transfusion of, like, fluorescence.

So even if these flowers are kind of dead, they're still like, emitting a kind of energy force.

This is sort of like a another kind of idea that I think about a lot is that, we're always in transformation.

And so if objects can express sort I think about that all the time.

My aim is really to understand myself and the world around us, like how things, shape or influence us, how we how we become who we are.

I love when I see people experiencing the work and they're sort of mesmerized by that experience.

So whether that's like seeing themselves reflected into the surface of a painting, for instance, having some kind of like emotional response to, you know, a project that seems very mysterious to them, looking at all the the possibilities of identity formation and how that reflects how we can try to think of our identities as constantly information.

I think that that is, once it moves away from just the initial like, like capture somebody's curiosity to like moving somebody to have an emotional connection to that.

That makes me really happy to see.