In the weeks before Christmas we have all stumbled in various articles, features and interviews about toys for girls being all pink and alternative companies putting on the market engagingly innovative educational toys for girls who may be interested in disciplines such as engineering.
You may argue that the pink plague also exists in the fashion industry: despite talking about empowering women, most of the times designers think women still favour sugar, spice and all things nice. Yet there are people out there presenting different roles for women. Japanese artist and designer Hiromi Ozaki, better known as Sputniko!, is one of them.
Born in Japan and living between Boston and Tokyo, Ozaki first studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Imperial College London, then moved onto Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art, London.
Since graduating she developed a series of projects, films and installations employing technology to imagine an alternative woman of the future, artworks that won her many awards and acknowledgements.
Ozaki has indeed been recognised as an active social media influencer in Japan and the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) selected her as the youngest member of the Cool Japan Advisory Council (2012-2013).
Sputniko!'s practice works on two different levels - she first designs an object and then creates a film and music to accompany it.
In the last few years the artist has developed a series of projects that touch upon different subjects - from a cyborg living in a futurist Tokyo and designed to serve sushi on her rotating belt who rebels about her role of sex object and turns herself into a lethal weapon ("Sushiborg Yukari", 2010), to a "Menstruation Machine" (2010) simulating the pain and bleeding of a 5 day menstruation process, and an instrument that replicates a range of crow calls ("Crowbot", 2011) that a girl called Jenny uses to communicate with birds.
Most times Ozaki's projects are supported by or developed in collaboration with a range of tecnology, medicine or biology specialists and researchers from the academic community all over the world.
Her latest two projects employ high heels in futuristic ways: “Nanohana Heels – Healing Fukushima” (2012) presents a pair of leather, steel and aluminium shoes created with footwear designer Masaya Kushino that plant rapeseeds ("Nanohana" in Japanese) into the soil through a mechanical high heel activated when the wearer walks.
The shoes are supposed to heal Fukushima, the site devasted in 2011 when an earthquake and tsunami hit the local nuclear plant. Experiments by Belarusian scientists have indeed shown that rapeseed blossoms absorb radioactive substances such as Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 from the soil. The project won an Honorary Mention in the Hybrid Art Category at the 2013 Ars Electronica Awards.
The second project - "The Moonwalk Machine - Selena's Step" (2013) - was instead inspired by an amateur scientist, a 13 year old girl, who succeeded in launching a Hello Kitty doll aboard a rubber balloon into the stratosphere. The story in "The Moonwalk Machine" video revolves around a girl with the crazy dream of leaving female steps on lunar soil with a rover rigged with high heels.
Even though the story is romantically fantasti, the machine seen in the video Sputniko! launched for this project was made with the information provided by engineers and specialists at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The project also inspired the "Super Moon!" accessory collection developed by Bao Bao Issey Miyake and Sputniko! (one of the “Super Moon!” tote bags also appears in the video).
In 2013 Hiromi Ozaki joined the MIT Media Lab as an assistant professor to start the Design Fictions Group and explore in this way with her approach interdisciplinary researches at the Lab. Ozaki was also recently awarded the Vogue Japan Women of the Year 2013 Award.
We will hopefully see more creatives like Ozaki launching in 2014 alternative projects combining together art, fashion, design, music, film, science and technology.
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