[IHJ Artists’ Forum/ Animation Screening & Artist Talk]
Life Touching Life (With Japanese Subtitles)

On December 6, 2023, the International House of Japan hosted a screening and presentation talk by the U.S.-Creative Artists Program Fellow Artist Dakota Gearhart, who spent five months researching techno-feminist animism in Japan for her ongoing collaborative video series “Life Touching Life”.

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Dakota is a transmedia artist whose practice concerns the effects of modern science and technology, focusing on the radical deconstruction of contemporary power structures according to an ecofeminist worldview. Her current animated video project, Life Touching Life, invites scientists, researchers, and caretakers to share their observations on consciousness and its relationship to biodiversity.During her fellowship, she traveled to Hokkaido, Honshu, and Okinawa to meet contemporary artists, scientists, and thinkers who are expanding the field of animism from a nonhierarchical point of view.

This video will play the Life Touching Life trailer at the beginning, followed by a digest of the talk.

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Speaker: Dakota Gearhart
Dakota Gearhart is a transmedia artist whose practice concerns the effects of modern science and technology with a particular focus on the radical deconstruction of contemporary power structures according to an ecofeminist worldview. Her current animated video project, Life Touching Life, invites scientists, researchers, and caretakers to share their observations on consciousness and its relationship to biodiversity. In this series, Gearhart performs as a half-woman half algae creature who introduces viewers to fictional species, like pixel bacteria. Color, humor, sound, and playful spaces of maximalism are common features of her collage-based aesthetic. Her work has been exhibited at The Bronx Museum of Art, NY; Tacoma Art Museum, WA; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, OR; Horse Hospital, London; Horse and Pony Gallery, Berlin; Lab’Attoir, Thessaloniki, Greece; and Taiyuan University, Taiyuan, China. She has been awarded the BRIC Digital Media Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fellowship, and a National Endowments for the Arts US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship which will bring her work to Japan in 2023. She is based in New York City where she is an adjunct professor at The New School and New York University.