Aki Inomata, the Tokyo-based interdisciplinary artist known for her genre-defying explorations of nature, technology, and identity, has ventured into the realm of beadwork through a radical series of experiments that merge traditional craft with cutting-edge augmented reality (AR). Renowned for her biologically informed works—such as hermit crab shells modeled after urban architecture or 3D-printed habitats for living organisms—Inomata’s bead projects continue her investigation of hybrid spaces where natural systems and human aesthetics coalesce. With her foray into beads, she challenges the static nature of tactile ornamentation by embedding it with layers of digital interactivity, thereby opening a new discourse about presence, memory, and the evolution of materiality in the post-digital era.
Inomata’s AR beadwork series, titled Invisible Threads, began with her fascination for encoded language and wearable archives. Beads, long used across cultures for storytelling, counting, and spiritual devotion, carry histories of communication that often lie hidden in their arrangements. Inomata reimagines these arrangements as encrypted data streams—akin to digital code—but grounded in physical form. Her early prototypes featured necklaces composed of translucent acrylic and glass beads arranged in sequences derived from binary code. Each color and shape represented bits of information—often drawn from genetic sequences, personal diaries, or soundwaves. On their own, the beadworks were visually minimalist, even cryptic. But when viewed through a smartphone or AR headset, the bead strands acted as markers that activated 3D holographic overlays: flickering text, blooming animations, ancestral photographs, or AI-generated dreamscapes emerging around the body of the wearer.
The technical realization of this concept required collaboration with software engineers and AR developers. Inomata employed AR tracking technologies similar to those used in QR codes, where bead positions, colors, and light refraction were analyzed by a custom-built app to trigger specific digital responses. In this hybrid format, each bead became more than a decorative unit—it became a physical anchor for virtual content. The interactivity allowed her to play with visibility and opacity, both literally and metaphorically. Certain pieces revealed digital messages only under specific lighting conditions or only when the user moved around the beadwork at a particular angle, mirroring the elusive nature of memory and identity she often investigates in her broader body of work.
One standout project from the Invisible Threads series, My Body is Not a Shell, revisits her earlier themes of hermit crabs and identity migration. In this work, she created a collar-style bead necklace using mother-of-pearl, antique Czech seed beads, and laser-cut bioplastic. The bead arrangement represented the DNA sequence of a land snail species native to Okinawa, which is endangered due to habitat loss. When viewed through AR, the beads unfolded into a three-dimensional shell form hovering around the wearer’s neck, populated by slowly crawling digital snails. The user could tap on individual beads via the AR interface to “release” the snails, which would migrate across the room’s walls in the headset’s field of vision. The work was not only poetic but deeply political, touching on themes of environmental displacement, non-human agency, and symbiosis.
Inomata’s application of beads within augmented reality also draws attention to the way we perceive ornamentation in a digital age. By infusing beads with interactive properties, she questions the very function of adornment. Are we adorning ourselves for physical interaction, or for the gaze of machines and digital audiences? One of her more provocative experiments, Social Skin, consists of a series of beaded brooches that change color and animate based on the viewer’s biometric data. Using wearable sensors linked to a smartphone app, the AR overlay of each bead brooch would pulsate, shift hue, or ripple with texture depending on the viewer’s heart rate or gaze duration. This effectively turned each beadwork into a living portrait—not of the wearer, but of the perceiver—flipping the object-subject relationship in ornamentation. The physical brooch remained fixed and elegant, while its augmented twin reflected flux, tension, and interaction.
These works were showcased in exhibitions that emphasized both their haptic and digital layers. At the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Inomata constructed an immersive environment in which viewers moved through a forest of bead strands suspended from the ceiling. Some of these strands acted as AR triggers, each linked to different plant and animal voices that could be heard through directional headphones or visualized as reactive waveforms. The installation invited viewers to think of the bead not as a closed loop, but as an interface—a node in a network of sound, vision, and touch that extended beyond the limits of traditional material culture.
In keeping with her collaborative ethos, Inomata has also begun to open-source portions of her AR bead technology. Working with digital artisans and cultural heritage specialists, she has initiated workshops in which participants create their own bead sequences encoding personal data or family stories, later enhanced with AR overlays. These workshops have been particularly powerful for diasporic communities, allowing users to layer oral history and visual memory into wearable heirlooms that transcend physical boundaries. The beads become both personal archive and shared interface, allowing memories to be re-experienced in augmented space long after the original story has faded.
Despite the high-tech nature of her work, Inomata maintains a deep reverence for the hand-crafted. All her beadwork is either stitched by herself or with the help of traditional bead artisans in Japan and abroad. She insists that the AR component not replace the physicality of the beads, but augment it—highlighting the irreplaceable role of touch, weight, and time in the act of making. The slight irregularities in handmade beads, the shimmer of a thread under light, the spacing between stitch and stitch—these, she says, are essential to grounding the digital elements, preventing them from becoming untethered illusions.
Aki Inomata’s experiments with augmented reality and beads are not simply technological novelties; they are poetic provocations that push us to reconsider what it means to adorn, to remember, and to interact in the twenty-first century. Her work weaves together code and craft, body and data, presence and projection. In each bead she places, there is a whisper of the ancient, and in each flicker of AR light, a gesture toward the future. Together, they form a bridge—not just between media, but between worlds, visible and invisible, virtual and real.