Artist Statement

Takeru Nakao's works attend to small phenomena and human acts that often pass unnoticed, tracing how they accumulate as traces, are transformed, and eventually give rise to new acts. An act becomes a trace, and a trace becomes an act again. Capturing the changes and relationships that emerge within this circulation lies at the foundation of his practice.

Using sensors, web applications, blockchain, algorithms, and computational design, he brings forth as perceptible—through recording, transformation, visualization, and materialization—processes and relationships that are not directly visible, such as movement, duration, interaction, ownership and use, value, and optimization. There, individual events are treated not as self-contained, but as occasions to be handed on to another time, another person, another act.

Central to this practice is a view of the present not as a fixed instant, but as a provisional state in which traces accumulated from the past intersect with possibilities for acts and interactions still open to the future. The present is neither a place where the results of the past are merely left behind, nor a mere point of passage toward the future. It exists as a site where inherited traces take on new meaning and can turn into the next act. When we perceive at once what has been carried over from the past and the possibilities of a future not yet realized, how do the meaning and appearance of the present change? That question runs through the work.

Here, technology is not merely a tool for measuring, recording, and optimizing phenomena. It is a framework for giving form to overlooked events and letting them circulate from person to person, across time. What is recorded is not only preserved; by being transformed, visualized, and received by another subject, it generates further acts.

From act to trace, from trace to the next act. Exploring how, within that chain, the meaning of events shifts and the present is renewed lies at the core of Takeru Nakao's practice.