Kaoru Tanaka is a self-taught digital artist based in Osaka, Japan, where she creates generative art and real-time experiences that blur the line between dreams and the living world. Her work draws its raw material from her daily life, her dreams, and the nature that sets the rhythm of her days, as well as from the ideas of John Maeda, a designer and technologist whom she particularly admires for establishing the fundamental laws of how computers think and for demonstrating why this matters to all of us, whether we’re programmers or not. Armed with 3D and 4D tools, she experiments, iterates, and gives form to her emotions through visual installations, videos, and real-time interactive works. Her practice explores visual feedback loops, based on repetition and fueled by interaction, to generate unprecedented digital worlds. Kaoru Tanaka thus seeks to probe the relationship between the organic nature of humans and the mechanical nature shaped by programming, bringing together the apparent opposites of order and chaos.

Her work has been exhibited at international institutions and events such as Art Basel Miami Beach, the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, TODA in Dubai, Prada Extends Tokyo, and the MIT School of Engineering, as well as at the MUTEK festival in Tokyo. Her works have been shown in the United States, France, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and China. In terms of collaborations, she notably lent her generative art to Shiseido for the “Future Reflections” project and adorned INFINITI’s flagship QX80 SUV with a pattern inspired by the brain’s synaptic connections. Her work “Opaline Dream” was also projected onto the giant screen at Wuhan Tiandi, in collaboration with the DIGMEGA group, and her “Dimensionscape” series was streamed on the Foundation platform. Recognized for her technical mastery of TouchDesigner, she has been invited as a speaker at specialized workshops (TDSW) to share her methods for working with particles and interaction.