ABOUT
This is me. I am Kenji Tanaka, a Berlin based composer, sound artist, and light & sound designer as well as light and sound operator.
KENJI TANAKA
[he/him]
Composer, sound artist, and light & sound designer Kenji Tanaka received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Middlesex University London in 2008 after four years of study in Recording Arts at SAE Berlin. In his diploma thesis he dealt intensively with stereophony. Since then he has been fascinated by the immediacy of three-dimensional sound. For more than 12 years he has been working in sound production as well as in the field of light staging for art and culture. For the past six years he has been using surround-capable high-end audio systems in his artistic work, creating immersive sound installations ranging from 5.1 to 23.1 surround sound.
He also creates light installations for theater and dance and creates lighting concepts for cultural events. Fascinated by the practice around art and artificial intelligence, he collectively deals with the phantom AI together with various artists and examines the strange behavior in the experience around the advancement of artificial intelligence into areas of artistic creation.
In "SLOW ROOMS" a narrative spatial installation (Berlin, 2019) as well as " Wüste Zukunft" a VR film (Ballhaus Ost, Haus der Statistik, Berlin 2020 / Revival PAF - Performing Arts Festival Berlin, May 2022), "Social Capsule" (immersive spatial installation, Monopol Berlin and Holzmarkt 25, Berlin 2021) and the immersive sound and space installation "AI Forest" (Ars Electronica Festival, Linz 2021), Kenji Tanaka collaborated with artists such as Theresa Reiwer, Alisa Tretau, Anne Brammen, David Egger and Birke van Maartens.
In his collaborations as well as in his solo work, he critically and at the same time open-mindedly deals with issues surrounding technological progress. As an artist working in exchange and collaboration with other artists in the field of immediate, narrative and performing arts, the Covid-19 pandemic created an enormous interest in overcoming the desensitizing distance between technology and the conscious mind, so as not to have to give up the experience of performing arts in times of self-isolation and social distance.
In his latest research idea, he strives to use modern technology to make immediate art forms, designed for sensory experience, auditorily tangible in three dimensions, even outside of venues and beyond the general understanding of stereo audio.
Kenji is a producer and under the names Jürgen Peng, Tanaka, and Tanaka Canziani he has been a live act in the Berlin and international club scene for more than 10 years.