In Conversation: Christian Sardet & Shiro Takatani, moderated by Tetsuya Ozaki

Christian Sardet

Christian Sardet received his PhD from the University of California Berkeley. In the 1980s, he established a Cell and Developmental Biology Research Unit at the Observatoire océanologique de villefranche-sur-mer (OOV) where he now serves as Research Director Emeritus under the joint auspices of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and the Université Paris 6, P. & M. Curie.
As one of the cofounders and coordinators of the Tara Oceans expedition, Sardet himself navigated the globe filming and photographing plankton. He works closely with Noé Sardet and Sharif Mirshak, “The Macronauts,” notably on photograp​h​ic exhibitions, multimedia projects and a site “Plankton Chronicles,” produced with the CNRS by their company Parafilms in Montreal. The team bridges art and science to foster broader appreciation of evolution, biology and ecology by means of documentaries, animated films and exhibitions.
Sardet was awarded the 2007 European Award for Communication in Life Sciences from the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). His publications include the book Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World (Ulmer, 2013, Kawade Shobo: 2014, University of Chicago: 2015).

Shiro Takatani

Shiro Takatani, one of Japan’s best-known visual artists, has been involved in designing exhibition installations for KYOTOGRAPHIE.
Born in 1963 in Nara, Takatani became a co-founder of the internationally-known artist collective, Dumb Type, while still a student at Kyoto City University of Arts. He has been active in a wide range of fields−from visual arts to lighting, graphics, and set design. He began a parallel solo career in 1998, and through the utilization of some of Japan’s most advanced technologies, his multifarious work has gained wide recognition. As the first Japanese artist to participate in Cape Farewell, a “cultural response to climate change,” he ventured into the North Atlantic, showing his deep concern for this global issue.
Among Takatani’s performance works are Chroma (2012) and Life-Well (2013), a collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Mansai Nomura. In 2015, his work ST/LL was shown in France and Belgium to great acclaim, and in January 2016 it made a triumphal return to Biwako Hall in Japan. He has also held solo exhibitions, including Camera Lucida (2013, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography).

Tetsuya Ozaki

Born in Tokyo in 1955. Publisher and
chief editor of culture web magazines “Realtokyo” and “Realkyoto”. Former publisher and chief editor of a bilingual contemporary art magazine “ART iT” (www.art-it.asia) which aims to cover the Japanese and Asian-Pacific art scenes. He was involved in the establishment of a culture magazine “03 Tokyo Calling” as deputy chief editor in 1989, was in charge of editorial direction of the Japan pavilion “Sensorium” of Internet World Expo in 1996 and the theme magazine “Cou-cou no chi” of Aichi World Expo 2005. He founded “Realtokyo” in 1999, “ART iT” in 2003, and “Realkyoto” in 2007. Among his productions are a CD-ROM book “Multimedia Kabuki” and “One Hundred Years of Idiocy,” a photography book with contributions by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, author Ikezawa Natsuki, movie
director Abbas Kiarostami and others. He left the ART iT company in 2010, and became General Producer of performing arts section, Aichi Triennale 2013. He wrote and published a photo book “One Hundred Years of Lunacy” in 2014 and currently is a guest researcher,
Academic Research Center, Kyoto University of Art and Design.