[Event] A capsule hotel in Tokyo hands its seventh floor to play

Until Sunday, a decommissioned capsule hotel near Tokyo's book district is an eight-floor venue called TOKYO JAZZ CLUB, and the seventh floor belongs to playable work. Tomo Kihara is showing Game of Possible Lives there, next to JODI's OXO and Kuwakubo Ryota's loopScape, per Kihara’s announcement, alongside artists including Mitchell F. Chan, Jonas Lund and Gabriel Massan. Kihara has also hidden something new in the building: flowchart-style "game poems" that complete themselves, in Kihara's words, "the moment you look at it," tucked into spots like the elevators.

The venue is half the story. TOKYO JAZZ CLUB occupies the former nine hours Otemachi in Kanda-Nishikicho, a building made of sleeping capsules stacked like cartridges, converted by Robbie Okuda Fitzpatrick and Yael Salomonowitz, two of the founders of Basel Social Club, and timed to Art Week Tokyo. It runs Nov. 1 to 8, with art, games, live performance, music and sushi under one roof: 2,500 yen for a timed entry, 4,000 yen for all eight days, free for anyone 19 and under.

It is also the first time Kihara has shown work in a venue where the pieces can be sold, an experiment by the artist's own description. The game poems are the sellable form of a practice that has mostly resisted objecthood; a flowchart that plays out in your head the moment you read it is about as light as a game can get.

Killscreen has chased Game of Possible Lives all year, from the census-fed cabinet at the Mori Art Museum to a projector version in a former Silesian coal mine. A capsule hotel is its third strange host in twelve months, and the most literal: a machine for simulating lives, installed in a machine for storing sleepers. Doors close Sunday, Nov. 8, at 6 p.m.