Image: NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo
NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo is presenting 'Emergencies! 048: Just a Bit of Those Things' by Keita Miyashita through August 16, 2026. The exhibition opened on June 20 and remains on view in ICC’s ongoing 'Emergencies!' series, which the institution uses for focused presentations by contemporary artists working with media, technology and systems-based approaches.
ICC’s exhibition page describes Miyashita as an artist whose work has centered on information networks, electricity and communications as forms of contemporary infrastructure. The project takes as its starting point the idea that the technologies underlying everyday life can be observed, interpreted and rebuilt through distinctive systems. In the gallery, the installation is said to be filled with flashing light, rhythmic sound and a low-frequency hum.
According to the museum, the sounds and signals in the exhibition include desk lamps, light bulbs and traffic lights blinking on and off, as well as the sounds of cans and walls being struck and the mechanical action of switches. The low hum is linked to the difference between eastern and western Japan’s electrical frequencies, 50Hz and 60Hz. ICC frames these elements as part of the digital and commercial power infrastructures that shape daily life.
The institution says that in digital environments, events are encoded as combinations of 0s and 1s, and that Miyashita’s systems transform signals that people cannot directly read back into perceptible events. One device in the exhibition converts alternating current into sound, offering a way to reconsider electricity as infrastructure and as the basis for contemporary information society.
ICC also says the exhibition reconstructs earlier works and raises questions about how viewers can understand the contemporary environment through what the artist calls the “small things” of everyday life. The venue’s materials do not indicate additional interpretive claims beyond that framework, but they place the project within Miyashita’s wider interest in the relationship between technology and human perception.
A related artist talk and live performance by Miyashita is scheduled for August 9, 2026, at 3 p.m. ICC identifies Miyashita as an artist, engineer and improviser who works with systems and devices to explore relations between electricity, information, communication and human beings. The museum notes that his sound-communication work 'BEAT/BIT' was selected as a jury recommendation in the art division of the 25th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2022. 'Emergencies! 048: Just a Bit of Those Things' runs at ICC in Tokyo until August 16, 2026.
