Image: Muku Kobayashi, Tsūchūtai, Teitōki (For Alternative Flight or Fall), 2026. Photo: Ryohei Tomita
Muku Kobayashi's kinetic installation 'Tsūchūtai, Teitōki (For Alternative Flight or Fall)' (2026) is on view at NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo as part of 'ICC Annual 2026: What Is Left, What Remains, and What We Take on', which continues until 8 November 2026. The artist has also been featured in an episode of the YouTube programme 'MEET YOUR ART', which presents his work as purposeless machines and meaningless words in a style that ignores the viewer, and he will give a free artist talk at ICC on Saturday 24 October.
In the installation, a machine moves slowly. Its use is hard to grasp at first sight, but it appears to be ridden lying face down, with the rider changing posture, or having it changed by the machine. According to ICC, the work grows out of two 'non-flying airplanes' linked to the writer Taruho Inagaki and the inventor Edwin Albert Link, who both grew up in the early days of aviation. Inagaki, fascinated by early aircraft for which flying was an end in itself, made model airplanes he called 'air flying vessels', objects that had lost their utility and stood for the impossibility of flight. Link invented the Link Trainer, an early flight simulator for instrument training in poor visibility, which was never meant to fly.
Kobayashi is known for kinetic works that keep performing actions without a purpose. ICC notes that while this machine does have a use, his interest in Inagaki and the Link Trainer reflects a long-standing attention to the twisted relationship between function, purpose and actual use, and that by building the machine himself he explores flight, impossible for the human body alone, and the fall that cannot be separated from it.
Born in Tokyo in 1992, Kobayashi holds MFAs from Tama Art University and Kyoto City University of Arts and also performs live, including as the duo Shojiki with Mitsuru Tokisato.
