Most creative technology scenes are structured as a hierarchy with art at the top: you do commercial work to fund the real work, and you don’t talk much about the commercial work.
Tokyo doesn’t do that, and it’s the most interesting thing about it.
The studios, and the thing they have in common
Rhizomatiks is the reference point. Founded in 2006 by Daito Manabe with classmates from Tokyo University of Science and IAMAS, it’s a collective spanning visual arts, media arts, programming, architecture and engineering. Its work runs from ELEVENPLAY dance collaborations to Olympic ceremonies to advertising, and it had its first large-scale museum solo show — rhizomatiks_multiplex — at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2021.
The methodology is data-first. As Manabe and co-founder Motoi Ishibashi describe it, most projects start with data: collaborating with dancers means collecting movement data, then working out how to turn it into visuals and sound.
Qosmo, led by Nao Tokui, is an AI creativity and music lab — researchers, engineers, artists and designers working on AI-extended creativity and, in Tokui’s phrase, “unknown music.”
BASSDRUM is the one with no real equivalent elsewhere: a technical direction collective. Not a studio that happens to employ technologists — an organisation whose product is technical direction across the stack.
teamLab, founded 2001, is the outlier by scale: roughly 350 staff, and a global immersive-exhibition business.
What links them is a refusal to separate registers. Tokui’s description of how it works: Manabe and Rhizomatiks “often experiment with a new idea in an art piece, then use the same idea or similar idea in commercial work” — and the reverse. An advertising budget buys R&D that shows up in a gallery; a gallery piece proves a technique that gets sold to a brand.
That’s not a compromise in Tokyo. It’s the engine.
Why “technical director” is a career here
BASSDRUM existing as a collective tells you something structural: in Japan, technical direction is a recognised discipline with a career path, rather than a thing a senior developer ends up doing.
The training route reflects it. Formal programmes exist — IAMAS (the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, in Gifu) is the significant one, and Kensuke Sembo teaches in the New Media department at Tokyo University of the Arts. But apprenticeship is still live: sound artist Yuri Suzuki spent five years with Maywa Denki before his own practice, which is a length of commitment that barely exists in Western creative tech.
The institutional layer is older than you think
Tokyo has been funding this since the 1990s, which is why the scene has depth rather than just activity:
- NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) — opened 1997, still running, a genuine media art institution rather than a venue that occasionally hosts it
- Japan Media Arts Festival — established 1997
- Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation
- YCAM (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, 2003) — not Tokyo, but the country’s most serious media art R&D centre, and worth the trip
- CCBT (Civic Creative Base Tokyo) — the newer city-backed platform supporting artists and technologists
- Tokyo Node, in the Toranomon Hills complex, the current high-profile venue for large-scale media art
The historical lineage matters too: Toshio Iwai, Maywa Denki, Dumb Type, Ryoji Ikeda — Japan was doing this before “creative technology” was a job title.
The bit that isn’t institutional at all
Exonemo — Yae Akaiwa and Kensuke Sembo — have run the Internet Yami-Ichi (“Internet Black Market”) since 2012: a flea market for things that only exist because of the internet. Discarded drives, obsolete gadgets, handwritten passwords, memes as physical objects.
It started because Apple rejected one of their apps.
It has since travelled to New York, Berlin, Taichung, Seoul, Linz, Brussels and Amsterdam. It is the single best thing to understand about Tokyo’s scene, because it’s the opposite of an institutional show: internet culture staged as a social event rather than represented inside a gallery.
Flying Tokyo, organised by Daito Manabe through Rhizomatiks Research, is the other informal layer — a workshop and lecture series that has brought international practitioners through the city for years.
What’s on this autumn
Three concrete reasons to be in Tokyo in the next two months:
MUTEK.JP 2026 — 20–23 November, at MoN Takanawa, the experimental museum inside the new Takanawa Gateway City complex, and a move from the festival’s long-standing Shibuya home. Daytime panels and workshops are open to the public, alongside the Eternal Art Space media art exhibition; evenings are audiovisual performance and electronic music, closing on the 23rd. Max Cooper anchors the lineup, with Robert Lippok (To Rococo Rot), the Neuroscan project by Canblaster and Neurotypique, and audiovisual duo Tamanaramen. Four-day passes are ¥25,000, with single-day tickets available; seated options exist if you don’t want to stand for four nights. Over nine editions MUTEK.JP has platformed more than 260 Japanese artists, which makes the daytime programme the most efficient way to meet the scene.
Art Week Tokyo — 4–8 November, a record 55 venues. Not media-art-specific, but it’s how the commercial gallery layer becomes navigable in one week.
MEET YOUR ART FESTIVAL 2026 — 9–12 October at Terrada Art Complex, and a second run 4–27 December at Yoyogi Park Panorama Plaza, free admission.
If you’re trying to plug in
The honest advice: the daytime programme at MUTEK.JP is the highest-value entry point this year. Panels and workshops, open to the public, in a scene where the studios are small and the same few hundred people do everything.
Beyond that — ICC for the historical spine, Tokyo Node for the spectacle, CCBT for what the city is currently funding, and Yami-Ichi whenever it surfaces, because that’s where the scene is being itself rather than presenting itself.
Related Reading
- Code + Culture: The interface between tech and creativity — The Japan Times
- MUTEK Tokyo — official site
- Sprawling digital art, music and tech festival Mutek is returning to Tokyo in November — Time Out Tokyo
- Rhizomatiks — official site
- BASSDRUM
- Qosmo — AI Creativity & Music Lab
- NTT InterCommunication Center — exonemo archive
- Civic Creative Base Tokyo (CCBT) — exonemo
- Art Week Tokyo — 4–8 November 2026
- Flying Tokyo — Rhizomatiks Research