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Sputniko! on Activism Multitasking

Artist, designer and entrepreneur Hiromi Ozaki—better known as Sputniko!—recently spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony). The artist and multitasker reflects on digital activism, capitalism’s impact on art and building inclusive systems amidst backlash.
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‍Peter Bauman: I wonder how you see the relationship between technology and society evolving. Your work examines the social, cultural and ethical implications of emerging technologies. How has technology enabled you to interrogate so-called taboos in a way that aligns with your artistic voice?‍

‍Sputniko!: It goes back to my background. I grew up as someone really interested in mathematics and computing since I was very young. I studied computer science and maths in university and I was very excited at how technology is really designing a new society, new systems, even breaking apart power structures—all the hierarchies existing in society. It felt like technology was really shifting that. I was excited. But then, while I was studying in university, although still excited, I observed that there were not enough diverse voices in technology. There were a hundred people in my computer science class and only about 10% were female. It wasn’t just gender. There was quite a lot of class and racial inequality, which I felt really uneasy about.

Then I started to think, “How can I address this issue? Shall I be a researcher, engineer?” But then I was very inspired by artists like Laurie Anderson—artists speaking out about technology, society and its inequalities. That's when I started to make music, performances and installations. That's my background and my progress.

People say that what I'm working on—topics, like menstruation—are taboos, but for me, it doesn't exactly feel like a taboo. It feels like, obviously, we need to talk about menstruation. Why is this even taboo? Half the population on the planet suffering from menstruation issues shouldn't be taboo. “Oh, you're such a punk, radical artist working on taboos.” I feel like, well, it's a normal thing to be working on.

How does technology enable me to do that? For example, in Menstruation Machine, I was exploring how technology could be used to cross gender boundaries so that maybe even biological men can experience the whole process. Maybe that would trigger a new discussion.
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In that work, there was another aspect of technology enabling me. It was the beginning of social media. It was 2010 when I showed that work on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook. It's wild to think that nowadays it's so normal for everyone to post everything on social media. Maybe even the most radical taboo ideas get the most views now? It's very normalized now. But in 2010, we were still in a phase of experimenting with social media.

At least around me—especially with Japanese media—there was this traditional mainstream media that never, ever talks about women's bodies, menstruation or anything related to feminism or gender issues. So technology in that way enabled me to break that and bring that topic up in public—open it up. Then, because it was a topic that a lot of people wanted to talk about, my video went really viral in 2010, which led to Vogue Japan giving me that Woman of the Year Award in 2013. In that aspect, I think technology enabled me to talk about these issues that were considered taboo, which I didn't think were taboo. That was a very 2010 thing that happened with that work. Technology enabled me then for sure.

If I answer the question now in 2024, I'm not sure if it is enabling me in a sense. It feels like I see many issues to talk about within tech or what technology is bringing us in the future—like quite a lot about what AI is doing. But I'm not sure if I feel like it's enabling me so much now.

‍Peter Bauman: How do you think technology, or your relationship with it, has changed over the past fifteen years—from enabling to now less so?‍

‍Sputniko!: This relates to the backdrop of the solo show I’m doing at KOTARO NUKAGA in Tokyo, Can I Believe in a Fortunate Tomorrow? It was all about the fifteen years of my career as an artist and the fifteen years of technology and society—how it really felt like it changed for me. In the solo show, I mention how in the early 2000s and 2010s, technology felt like a liberating force for me. I think there was a brief moment because never before could anyone express what they're thinking or post their difficulties or other frustrations.
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It was a great force leading to the Me Too movement, Black Lives Matter and citizen journalism. That led to a lot of the progress that happened in the 2010s. What's happening right now is, obviously, we're seeing a different nature of technology. It's spreading so much misinformation and conspiracy theories with all the filter bubbles and the algorithms affecting how we think.

We think we have free will but do we actually have free will? We're extremely affected by these digital platforms. The owner, Elon Musk of X, has extreme views about politics and society. He himself posts quite a lot of misogynist comments like sharing that women can’t do critical thinking or misinformation about immigrants online. It's a very concerning thing that's happening.

That combined with AI—I'm still conflicted about AI. I use AI every day, and it's very convenient for my work. But I can see how so many people could lose their jobs through AI. We're already living in a society with inequality and I don't see how AI is going to reduce the inequality happening in society. There are people talking about Universal Basic Income [UBI], sharing the profit earned from AI. I think Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, is writing blogs about how to design society possibly with UBI. He's also doing quite a lot of research on UBI. Still, it feels like a scary path to more inequality and more digital control. I'm not extremely optimistic right now about tech compared to how I was in 2010. At the time, I thought it was the key to solving gender inequality and so many other issues—that it was going to dissolve power structures. Now it feels like it could reinforce power structures even more. I don't want to lose hope. I still want to always try to figure out what I can do best at that time.
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Thankfully, I studied computer science. I know quite a lot about tech and I'm a minority. I have an artist background. I'm an Asian woman. So maybe I have a different viewpoint that I can provide to the tech world. 

I'm also a company founder so I know a bit about business. I feel like in my career, I consider myself a social activist a little bit. Since I was very young, I always wanted the world to be a better place because I struggled a lot growing up in Japan with so much gender inequality.

I always felt like, “I wish the world could be a better place.” In the beginning, arts were a good fit for me, like creating Menstruation Machine. Then I started teaching in university. I'm also a media personality in Japan. Then I founded Cradle, my company. That's another way for me to try to make the world a little bit better.
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I don't see myself as doing arts only. I feel like a multitasking activist a little bit. I don't try to define myself by one thing.

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‍Peter Bauman: You mentioned Can I Believe in a Fortunate Tomorrow?—your solo show in Tokyo, which I was very "fortunate" to see the preview of recently and meet you as well. In the show, you use AI image recognition to pose questions about the nature of happiness and whether technologies that focus on efficient happiness really align with a fulfilling life like they claim to. How do you see the relationship between technology and happiness evolving? And what insights did you gain from this project about the human desire for meaning in a world that's increasingly automated?‍

‍Sputniko!: It's such a difficult question. Even myself, I'm addicted to the Internet too much. I try to stay away from my smartphone. And then when I'm really tired, I'm checking out the news, X or Instagram. One part of the solo show, Drone in Search for a Four-Leaf Clover, is a very Zen piece in a way. I can feel a bit of Buddhism injected in, too. It's a drone with AI searching for this clover of happiness, a four-leaf clover. It can identify all the four-leaf clovers—or happiness—immediately. But does that really make you happy? That's the question. For me, it doesn't. The whole point of finding that clover is spending that time and effort.

There's another part of the show about saiun, clouds with rainbow-like colors. There’s an Asian Buddhist saying that if you see a cloud glowing like a rainbow, it’s good luck. I saw a saiun once in real life, which I took a picture of and posted on Twitter. I still remember that day I found that cloud of good luck.
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The piece is called Can I Believe in a Fortunate Tomorrow? AI is continually generating these saiun rainbow clouds at an impossible pace. You keep seeing this sign of good luck. You're in between fake news and reality. With these two pieces, I'm exploring this relationship between technology, efficiency and happiness.
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It's something I think about a lot now, especially with AI. It's so convenient and it's so easy to do tasks, but somehow, I'm not sure if we're capable of using it in a way that makes us happier.

John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, in 1930 predicted that in a hundred years industrialization would save so much time—humans would be so much more efficient—that people would only be working fifteen hours a week. It's 2024 so we’re almost to 2030. But I don't think we're working fifteen hours a week at all. We're working quite a lot. Working hours are not going down so much. They may be rising even, which is sad because we're even more efficient now compared to the 1930s with computers and AI. But we're not capable of doing fifteen-hour work weeks yet as a society. That's all down to the power of capitalism. As long as the capitalists have the power, even if AI can do a lot more work efficiently, I think they want workers to work to the fullest extent.

I think about this issue quite a lot. So I started doing research on four-day work weeks. Recently, the company has been doing four-day weeks. As a company CEO, we're trying to IPO in 2027, and I want to be the first company to IPO in Japan with only four-day work weeks. We still think about salary as a way to pay back workers but I think quality free time is a very important thing to think about.
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I’d like to give more free days to my employees. This is my social experiment and almost like an artist's statement as a company CEO.

I think quite a lot of big tech companies have stopped remote work. You need to come to the office five days a week—work, work, work. If they're trying to progress AI tech and efficiency, then I think we need to redesign how we work and how we think about time and labor. Not enough discussions are happening around these topics.

‍Peter Bauman: It's so interesting to think about in five or six years, by 2030, how AI might affect work. I'd like to come back to capitalism and art but wanted to ask one more question about our relationship with technology. I really enjoyed something you said to Jason Bailey on Right Click Radio about how technology for the vast majority of human history has been non-digital—things like the printing press, farming and books. Then they become so integrated into our daily lives that we stop thinking about them as human inventions—things the vast majority of people who ever lived didn't have. Now that’s happening with digital technologies.‍

‍What do we lose and gain when distinctions between digital technology and everyday life start to disappear?‍

‍Sputniko!: Social media, searching, video calls—they became such an everyday thing for us. Recently, I've been talking to ChatGPT every single day, asking questions or asking anything about my life—what to do with my daughter even. If my daughter doesn't want to brush her teeth, I use the audio function on ChatGPT to say, “Can you tell her to brush her teeth?” My daughter listens to ChatGPT more than she listens to me sometimes. She calls it her ​​“電話のお姉ちゃん” [denwa no ojichan], which is Japanese for “telephone sister” [laughs]. So I use it to raise my child [laughs].

Recent AI progress is great for anyone with dyslexia, for example. It can take a really difficult book and make it into a podcast or make it into a snippet, a summary text. It creates new ways of learning things, which is very exciting.

But what’s scary is that I'm starting to not doubt everything that AI is telling me. When AI says certain things, I'm pretty sure some of it might not be true still. There are many fewer hallucinations these days but I'm sure there are inaccurate things in there. But as the quality gets better and better, I'm almost blindly trusting everything AI is telling me, which is a bit worrying. There's so much information I want to process, but I'm almost skipping that very necessary checking process.
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‍Peter Bauman: You mentioned capitalism earlier but when I talk to curators, they typically have more of an anti-capitalist take—museums in general do. Although you spoke to Paola Antonelli at MoMA about your work and capitalism on her podcast Design Emergency and she was very positive. You’ve even described your business, Cradle, as art.‍

‍Relating that to what's happening now in the NFT space—where financialization is baked into the product in a way, for better or for worse—how do you see the relationship between capitalism and art? Is it always entirely antagonistic?‍

‍Sputniko!: This is a great question because capitalism is just a tool to achieve things. There are many occasions where making money becomes the main goal, which makes everything boring. I think this happens a lot in the NFT-blockchain space. You can see the price of every piece being sold. People talk about how “this was sold out on this day. This was sold to that collector.”

What's really sad about this digital art blockchain space is that a lot of artists start to only think about the price. “Can I sell this for this price?” “I didn't sell for this price.” “What’s the right price?” It's so, so, so boring. I hated that about the contemporary art market. I thought the blockchain space was exciting and interesting because it felt like some artists were really taking power and control of capitalism—the system a little bit. But then, after a few years, it's quite a lot of artists focusing a lot on price, price, sell, sell. In the contemporary art market, the price is not so apparent but with blockchains it is. So it got even worse because everything is crystal clear.
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For me, good art is art that changes ideas, changes perspectives or changes society even.

I don't think art that sells for millions is necessarily good art at all. Even if it did, money is like water; it flows through people. Maybe at one point in history, some art sold for quite a lot of money. But if that art didn't have any effect on society or people's minds, then it's just lost. It's just one chunk of money being moved around—like selling real estate. That's it. It's no different. I don't get excited about the art market at all.

That's the big reason I wanted to start my own company, because I really hated capitalism growing up as a young student. I think it has a very bad effect, too, because if you leave capitalism alone, people with more capital are going to gain even more capital. Capitalism is like an inequality machine in a way.

But if you understand it and if you're trying to hack it, you can use it for a better cause. You can build things, hire people, and make change in the world in a very scalable way. I was so anti-art market, I decided to create a company, and the company would build things that would generate change, which I believe in. That's why I created Cradle because I really believed in women's health issues. So Cradle works on menstruation, menopause and fertility issues. But we actually expanded recently. We also work on transgender and men's health. Men can experience hypogonadism. Because it's treated as a taboo topic, a lot of men don't even know they go through this, which may or may not be related to hormones.

So gender-specific health issues are what we cover in our company. And that's motivating for me because the company is changing society as well as bringing in money. Because we have more money, we have the freedom to do even more work. That's more exciting than posting my work online and worrying whether it was auctioned in Sotheby's for this or that price. I'm so happy about what I'm doing. I think more people should consider their own business. I'm very fortunate because I have a computer science and math background.
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I’m not saying everyone can succeed in business. But I think if you have the opportunity, it might be good for you to understand or think about building products and services as a way of building and spreading your idea. 

It's a lot more accessible now than ten years ago—raising funds or building a company. I get quite passionate about capitalism and can talk a lot on this topic.

‍Peter Bauman: It aligns with conceptual art and idea-focused art. Conceptualism emphasizes that the final product isn't what matters; it's the ideas. In that way, it's perfectly rational for a company to be art if the artist is intending to emphasize changing people's minds and promoting things like diversity, representation and gender health issues.‍

‍That also leads to the next broad topic: how you achieve your goals now through Cradle. Not entirely—you did just open a solo show. But these issues your work emphasizes—like inclusion and diversity—are also increasingly under attack. This goes back to that changing relationship with technology over the last fifteen or so years. What do you think has been the cause of some of this backlash? What role does technology play?‍

‍Sputniko!: A lot of the backlash—and it's happening a little bit in Japan, too, but maybe not as much as in the US—mainly stems from just feeling that threat. It’s a threat to traditional power structures. Some may feel like they're going to lose their status, sense of identity or influence.

I read an interesting paper about who is most likely to make misogynist comments, mentioning men who feel marginalized or insecure. It's the same in Asia. They really attack women and feminism quite a lot. It's sad because for me, their enemy shouldn't be women. It’s society’s competitive structure that is making them feel miserable. It’s a very macho structure that they're having to fit within.
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It forced me to change my technology tactics quite a lot. In the 2010s, I tweeted and posted often. I had a lot of followers. But around 2020 is when I started getting a lot of misogynist attacks from men online. They were always attacking me—even spreading rumors and conspiracy theories about my company. One interesting conspiracy theory said that my company has a surrogacy factory in India that’s making women have babies through surrogacy—all these absurd things.

I decided to stay away from X. Now I try not to be discovered online because it causes trouble. But because I'm well-known enough in Japan—writing a newspaper column in Nikkei or talking directly with big companies like Sony—the backlash is still happening.

But it's sad because I think it's silencing people a lot more now. I think it would be much harder if I were 25 years old now and on X for me to voice my ideas. I think I was lucky. I was 25 years old in 2010. At the time, I was a young student—didn't have anything—and I would voice my opinions. It was still a much safer space for feminist activists. But now, in 2024, it's very difficult in Japan. I talk about the cause of the backlash with my friends, especially the feminist activists and influencers in Japan.
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We say that maybe 2010 was more a phase of speaking out and perhaps the '20s is more a phase of building things, making new systems or rules.

For example, I'm building a company, while my friend is creating a group that helps female entrepreneurs who get sexually harassed in Japan to get legal help. If you're a woman entrepreneur, some investors or VCs sexually harass you quite a lot. More than 50% of female entrepreneurs have the experience of being sexually harassed.

Even myself, when I was talking to investors, one investor didn't invest in me—and I didn't want him to—but he stroked my head after. It was disgusting. So my friend created a group that helps women because it’s been very difficult for women to get help since investors often have more power. If we speak out against them, they're often friends with each other. Maybe you can't get investments from other people if you say anything bad about one of them. So we’re building more than speaking it feels like in the '20s. We do feel sad about that, as we’ve almost been silenced a bit by these trolls.

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Sputniko! is a multimedia artist, designer, filmmaker and professor creating works on the themes of technology, gender and feminism. Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums including the MoMA, Centre-Pompidou Metz, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Cooper Hewitt and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Sputniko! taught at the MIT Media Lab as an Assistant Professor and was the director of the Design Fiction Group from 2013 to 2017. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Tokyo University of Arts.

Her work has been included in the permanent collections of museums such as the M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), Yokohama Museum of Art (Japan) and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Japan).

Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's Editor-in-Chief.