For the opening exhibition at VS., Daito Manabe presented “Continuum Resonance,” a multi-room installation that unfolds across the building as a single, evolving acoustic system. Composed through mathematical algorithms, music programming, and 3D architectural data, the exhibition positions sound not as an accompaniment to space, but as its primary organizing force—an invisible architecture that reshapes perception as visitors move through it.
The project marks a decisive shift in Manabe’s approach. “For this exhibition, I initially contemplated a comprehensive display of works spanning the past two decades, aiming to reexamine the trajectory of my individual artistic endeavors,” he explains. “However, inspired by Tadao Ando’s architecture, I pivoted towards a novel challenge.” Rather than surveying past achievements, Manabe chose to respond directly to the spatial conditions of VS., allowing the building itself to guide the work’s conceptual and technical direction.
Daito Manabe: From Xenakis to PolyNodes
Installation view of Continuum Resonance, VS. 2024, photo by Muryo Homma (Rhizomatiks).
At the foundation of “Continuum Resonance” lies Manabe’s long-standing engagement with mathematics and music. “The foundation of my creative process is rooted in mathematics and music,” he says. During his university years, he encountered Iannis Xenakis’s Music and Architecture (1971), a formative text that permanently shaped his thinking. “I was profoundly influenced by Iannis Xenakis’s seminal book Music and Architecture, which catalyzed the germination of my current artistic pursuits.” Xenakis’s radical experiments—most notably the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58—proposed sound as a spatial material long before the technology existed to fully realize it.
“The foundation of my creative process is rooted in mathematics and music,”
-Daito Manabe.
Manabe’s response to that legacy is PolyNodes, a groundbreaking 3D audio design system he co-developed with composer and programmer Sinan Bökesoy. Released in 2024, the software translates sound from conventional two-dimensional waveforms into dynamic three-dimensional structures, allowing tone, intensity, and spatial position to shift continuously within an architectural environment. Visual elements respond in parallel, producing a tightly integrated audiovisual field that feels both computational and sensorial.
Four Installations, One Evolving System
Installation view of “PolyNodes Augmentation” at Continuum Resonance, VS. 2024, photo by Muryo Homma (Rhizomatiks).
Each of the exhibition’s four installations activates PolyNodes differently. In PolyNodes Installation Debug Views, visitors encounter the system’s underlying logic as sound and image respond directly to bodily movement and gesture. PolyNodes Visualization intensifies this relationship, projecting shifting shadows and rhythmic bursts that give form to otherwise invisible acoustic structures. Sound here is no longer fixed—it swells, fragments, and migrates across the room.
In PolyNodes Augmentation, Daito Manabe introduces augmented reality and asymmetrical spatial mapping, pushing perception further into ambiguity. Shadowy clusters stretch across walls, low frequencies resonate physically through the body, and sound becomes something felt as much as heard. The final work, Synthesis of Body-Space-Music, expands vertically into a monumental volume, drawing on motion-captured dancers to influence PolyNodes’ parameters. Referencing Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer, the piece dissolves boundaries between body, space, and composition, with sound descending from above in sweeping, immersive layers.
A Dialogue with Tadao Ando
Installation view of “PolyNodes Augmentation” at Continuum Resonance, VS.、2024, photo by Muryo Homma (Rhizomatiks).
Throughout, Manabe’s dialogue with architecture remains central. Designed under the supervision of Tadao Ando, VS. is not treated as a neutral container but as an active collaborator. “For this exhibition, “Continuum Resonance,” I have chosen to fully leverage the potential and spatial characteristics of this building to create a new work that reinterprets the origins of my creative process within a contemporary context,” Manabe says. “Through a dialogue with Ando’s architectural space, VS., I aspire to produce an innovative piece that synthesizes my cumulative experiences with cutting-edge technological advancements.”
“I aspire to produce an innovative piece,”
-Daito Manabe.
The result is an environment that feels less like an exhibition than a living system—one in which sound, space, and human presence continually reshape one another. In extending Xenakis’s unfinished ambitions through contemporary tools, “Continuum Resonance” reframes media art not as spectacle, but as a resonant encounter between architecture, technology, and the body itself.
Installation view of “Synthesis of Body-Space-Music” at Continuum Resonance, VS. 2024, photo by Muryo Homma (Rhizomatiks).
