Data Body As Artifact: ISMAR 2015, Fukuoka, Japan

Alex May’s work was included in Data Body As Artifact, the ISMAR 2015 exhibition at Fukuoka City Museum in Fukuoka, Japan, running from 29 September to 4 October 2015. Curated by Julian Stadon, the exhibition brought together artists whose work explored the body as something recorded, reconstructed, extended, or reinterpreted through digital systems. May was represented through Sequence, the collaborative project developed with Anna Dumitriu.

That context gave the work a clear fit. Sequence draws on DNA sequencing and bio-digital process to connect biological material, computation, and aesthetic form, making data feel embodied rather than abstract. Within Data Body As Artifact, that placed May’s contribution inside a wider international conversation about how bodies become measurable, mediated, and transformed when they pass through technological frameworks.

For May, the exhibition connected directly to a broader practice concerned with how digital systems alter what can be seen, stored, and understood as real. Here those concerns were not framed through image capture alone, but through the relation between biological information, digital interpretation, and the shifting status of the body as both living presence and technological trace.