From 18 April to 25 August 2025, Prada presents the exhibition “Satellites” conceived by Danish movie director Nicolas Winding Refn with Japanese game creator Hideo Kojima at Prada Aoyama Tokyo. Supported by Fondazione Prada and conceived in collaboration with creative studio byNWR, the installation occupies the iconic building’s Herzog & de Meuron-designed fifth floor, offering an exploration of human connection through technology and narrative.
Refn and Kojima, longtime collaborators who share a fascination with blurring the lines between cinema and gaming, transform the space into a surreal mid-century apartment, complete with furnishings straight from a vintage set—think rotary phones, plush sofas, and softly glowing lamps. Central to the exhibit are six television screens crafted as retro-futuristic spacecraft, their open panels displaying tangled wires and circuit boards, echoing the intersection between past nostalgia and future possibilities.
Floating across these screens are contemplative exchanges between Refn and Kojima themselves, the filmmakers suspended in dialogue that transcends cultural and linguistic barriers—Refn in English, Kojima in Japanese. Their discussions navigate the realms of friendship, technological evolution, creativity, and existential reflections on death and legacy, inviting visitors to ponder their own interpretations.
In an adjacent dressing room, stacks of cassette tapes surround an old-school player. Visitors can mix and match these audio snippets—combinations of film scores and multilingual, AI-generated translations of Refn and Kojima’s conversation—to create personalized soundscapes. Each encounter with “Satellites” thus becomes uniquely tailored, emphasizing individual experiences within a collective narrative.
The exhibition underscores the artists’ shared vision of an increasingly hybrid media landscape, where cinema and gaming merge seamlessly into new digital dimensions. It’s an invitation to consider how technology reshapes human interaction, framed through the metaphor of satellites orbiting in dialogue, close enough to communicate yet perpetually distinct. “Satellites” presents a space not merely to observe but to inhabit, challenging the boundaries between viewer and creator, and between the physical and digital worlds.
