Before every gallery had a projector, Tony Oursler was throwing faces onto lumps of fabric and making them talk. His work is one of the reasons projection mapping reads as an artistic medium rather than a trade-show trick, and his current survey at Tokyo Node, in Toranomon Hills Station Tower, is a rare chance to see the range of it in one place. Between Technology and Spiritual Knowledge — Magic, Media, and Art closes September 27, so this is a last-call note as much as a profile.
The argument
Oursler’s persistent claim is that we have never related to media technology rationally. Every new medium (the magic lantern, spirit photography, the phonograph, television, the smartphone, and now AI) arrives wrapped in exactly the same promises: contact with the absent, voices from nowhere, images that know you. His installations take that seriously rather than mocking it. A projected face muttering from a pile of cloth is funny for about four seconds, then becomes genuinely unsettling, because it reproduces the trick every screen plays on us: a person who isn’t there, talking.
What’s on view
The survey spans thirty years:
- Private (1994–1997), from the period when he established the projected-figure vocabulary
- Specular (2021), with contemporary artist Jim Shaw
- Unrealized works conceived more than a quarter-century ago and only now built
- New site-specific works made for Tokyo Node
- A selection from Oursler’s archive of roughly 3,000 items covering science, magic and unidentified phenomena, which he has assembled for decades and which is the research foundation under everything else
- A collaborative project with David Bowie and composer Glenn Branca, shown publicly for the first time
That archive is the reason this exhibition is more than a greatest-hits reel. Oursler is not an artist who decorates with occult imagery. He collects the primary material of how people have historically explained technologies they didn’t understand, and the work comes out of that research.
Why it lands now
Every argument happening this year about AI (voices that sound like the dead, images of people who never existed, chatbots treated as companions) is a rerun of debates that accompanied spirit photography and the phonograph. Oursler was making that case when the internet was a novelty. Seeing three decades of it at once, in a tower in Tokyo, makes today’s discourse look a lot less unprecedented.
The exhibition is co-curated with Reiko Tsubaki. Tokyo Node is on the 45th floor of Toranomon Hills Station Tower, directly connected to Toranomon Hills station on the Hibiya line.