exonemo: Terminal

NowHere presents Terminal, a new exhibition by Japanese-born, New York-based artist duo exonemo, featuring a sculptural and computational installation exploring the relationship between humans and machines. About NowHere is pleased to announce Terminal, a new exhibition by Japanese-born, New York-based artist duo exonemo, opening this fall. The exhibition centers on The Terminal, a sculptural and computational installation in which a suspended rock hangs above a computer that continuously attempts to crack its own code through brute-force computation. If the code fails, the machine survives to try again; if it succeeds, the rock is released, destroying it. The work recasts the myth of Sisyphus as a distinctly contemporary parable, exploring the increasingly complex relationship between humans and machines. exonemo, formed by Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa in 1996, emerged from the early days of the internet and has spent three decades working across the digital and analog, the physical and informational. Moving fluidly between installation, performance, and net art; the duo's work resists easy categorization, and Terminal brings that same instinct—for finding the strange and the human inside the machine—into NowHere this fall. Terminal will be on view at 40 Lispenard Street from September 10 through November 7, 2026. exonemo are an artist duo made up of Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa. They began collaborating online in the mid-1990s in Japan before relocating to New York City. Their work sits right where internet culture meets physical space—utilizing humor, glitches, and everyday technology to explore how digital life alters attention, bodies, and relationships. Over time they've also made award-winning and institutionally commissioned works—like The Road Movie (2006), which won a Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, and 0 to 1 / 1 to 0 (2019), a web piece commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art that overlays your browser with the changing sky over Manhattan. Read more Toggle Digital Installation Performance / Live Art Sculpture