exonemo

Biography

exonemo is the Japanese artist duo of Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa, formed on the internet in 1996. Working across net art, installation, and software, their practice repeatedly returns to the seam between digital and physical experience — treating browsers, hardware, and code as material in the same way another artist might treat paint or stone. In 2006 their project "The Road Movie" won the Golden Nica in Net Vision at Prix Ars Electronica, one of the field's most established honors. They have lived and worked in New York since 2015. Since 2012 the duo has organized the Internet Yami-Ichi, a recurring "flea market" of internet-themed objects held in cities including Tokyo and New York, turning the ephemera of online culture into something collectors can hold. Their long-running project with the Whitney Museum, marking sunrise and sunset on whitney.org daily from 2009 to 2024, shows the same instinct at a quieter register: a website that briefly reveals the hardware and world behind it. More recently they have worked with NFTs, including a solo show at NOWHERE gallery in New York, extending questions about ownership and attachment to digital objects that they'd been exploring since long before NFTs existed.