In a revolutionary tribute to his friend, the late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, artistic director Todd Eckert brings a new interactive experience to Melbourne from 19 February to 16 March 2025.
In a format called “mixed reality,” where audiences use special glasses that present 3D moving images onto an existing environment, KAGAMI is the new show from Eckert’s revolutionary arts collective Tin Drum.
In what’s being described as a Full Dimensional Film, KAGAMI offers the experience of seeing Sakamoto perform at the piano with a full range of viewpoints and dimensions, as well as many other layers of audio-visual elements as viewers freely navigate the semi-virtual space.
KAGAMI
- Ryuichi Sakamoto + Tin Drum
- Australian exclusive
- 19 February – 16 March
- Melbourne Convention and Exhibition
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Speaking with Todd, his back against a plume of sunlit drapes, he presents as every inch the metropolitan artist. He energetically shakes my hand as we meet, dressed in loose black pants, a navy cashmere jumper and a white shirt buttoned to the top with no tie à la David Lynch.
Beginning as a music journalist from the age of 14 and becoming editor of the long-running trade press OnlyMusic at 17, Eckert has nurtured a rigorous work ethic from the earliest stages of his artistic life.
“I’ve always been fairly obsessive,” he ponders, “about whatever it was that I admired.”
A passion for Japanese-import LPs while growing up in Houston, Texas, brought him to the attention of the store owner, whose friend ran a music magazine and asked the young Todd if he wanted to write.
It was a succession of writing gigs that landed him the top job at “this weird national magazine, where bands that would not otherwise get national attention were being celebrated.”
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It was this experience which tuned Todd’s ear to the new and exciting pitches within mainstream culture that usually passed undetected. This has refined Todd’s ability to approach art and music from a unique, alternative viewpoint, an important factor within his latest work.
Ahead of KAGAMI’s completion, Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away in 2023. In spite of this, Todd insists the show is not a memorial for the late composer: it already had its structural form ahead of his death.
“I could have changed it,” Todd says, “but the point of it was always to create something that felt as if it was happening in real-time. If film is an artefact of something you weren’t there to see, this is the presentation of something where your agency – your determinism, your curiosity, your past – it all informs what you’re going to look for.”
In retaining the energy of a performance happening presently, more so than a tribute to the great composer’s works and life, Todd seeks to ensure permanent relevance for KAGAMI.
In stepping away from the backward-facing nature of a memorial, the work would survive only as an amusement for those who knew and loved Sakamoto’s work. Todd’s approach in processing the death of his friend is to remove it from the stasis of reflection, and to instead position it within the dynamic now.
Todd’s friendship with Sakamoto extends back to the 1990s, and the process of crafting KAGAMI together was one of weighing up reasons for and against collaborating in this mixed reality format.
In many ways, this new show represents the sum of all Todd’s previous efforts with Tin Drum and the mixed reality experiment.
“There were so many different works that we created on the way to making the thing that would be as substantial as KAGAMI,” he reflects on the previous works under his direction at Tin Drum. “There were a lot of different artists that really helped to understand what can this be, what should it be.”
One previous collaboration saw Eckert’s wife, legendary performance artist Marina Abramović, at the centre of a 19-minute Full Dimensional Film that laid much of the groundwork for what would be explored in KAGAMI.
Despite both working as artists, Todd insists the two occupy completely different worlds.
“For her, she’s kind of one of the most important living artists in the world – she’s at legend status – so her issue is really quite different from mine,” he suggests.
“So where I am trying to pull something out of thin air, she is not maintaining her legendary status because she never repeats herself. In many ways, our ability to understand what is going on with the other has been the only reason that we’ve been able to get through stuff.”
Todd Eckert’s ability to pull magic from thin air can be experienced first-hand across the coming month, with his new show KAGAMI presented at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
For tickets to KAGAMI, head here.
