New show investigates human connection through cinema, games, and tech
From April 18 to August 25, 2025, Prada Aoyama Tokyo will present Satellites, an immersive exhibition conceived by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn and Japanese video game creator Hideo Kojima. Organized in collaboration with Fondazione Prada and produced by Refn’s creative studio byNWR, the project explores themes of creative synergy, digital convergence, and human connection.
Set on the fifth floor of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed building, Satellites reflects over a decade of dialogue between Refn and Kojima. Their shared ideas are staged within a mid-century apartment-inspired installation, blending cinema aesthetics with interactive technology. Visitors navigate a domestic space where suspended video portraits of the two creators appear in contemplative conversation, speaking respectively in English and Japanese. Their exchange touches on themes such as collaboration, technology, identity, and mortality.
The centerpiece of the show includes six retro-futuristic televisions fashioned to resemble spaceships. Cutaway panels reveal internal circuitry and wiring, surrounding the moving images of Kojima and Refn. A second room, styled as a dressing area, features a cassette deck and a selection of tapes with voice recordings, cinema scores, and AI-translated versions of the pair’s dialogue in multiple languages. Guests can remix their own listening experience by browsing the tapes.
The title Satellites alludes to both physical orbit and metaphorical distance, reflecting how Kojima and Refn engage across media boundaries. While one works in interactive storytelling and the other in film, both believe in the ongoing convergence of their fields, enabled by shared technology and a growing digital ecosystem. The exhibition encourages visitors to consider how presence and absence, analog and digital, and intimacy and detachment can coexist in a shared creative space.
AloJapan.com