Yoichi Ochiai

Artist and researcher, Tsukaba

Yoichi Ochiai is a media artist, computer scientist and associate professor at the University of Tsukuba. His main research interests are human-computer interaction, and what he calls ‘Digital Nature’, an environment that fuses the digital with the analogue, blurring the boundary between nature and artifice; it is also the title of a book he published in 2018. At the University of Tsukaba, he heads up the research lab Digital Nature Group, which seeks to ‘solve problems around industry, academia and art’; recent projects include a display for real-time conversation captioning for people with hearing loss and a version of ‘drone badminton’ that can be played by people with visual impairments. His work has been highlighted in exhibitions including ‘AI: More than Human’ at the Barbican Centre in London in 2019 and ‘Reminiscence of the Unknown’, a solo exhibition at Tokyo Garden in 2020.

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