Tokyo, 2002 to 2006.

Rhizomatiks is a creative collective in Tokyo that works across media art, live performance, advertising and research. The name comes from botany by way of philosophy. Reporting on the collective’s tenth-anniversary exhibition on 19 April 2017, the Japanese advertising magazine AdverTimes wrote that the members had been drawn to the idea of the rhizome, an underground root stem, as a model of a varied structure. The magazine said the group came together in 2002 and was incorporated as a company in 2006.

The founders are named in later reporting. AdverTimes wrote on 2 November 2020, and again on 26 March 2021, that Rhizomatiks was established in 2006 by Seiichi Saito, Daito Manabe and Hidenori Chiba, with a sense of mission and ambition to open up new territory and make the world more interesting. English Wikipedia describes Saito as an architecture graduate of Columbia University in New York who worked in advertising before returning to Japan, and Chiba as a founding member with a background in website development.

Manabe gave his own account in a conversation with the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, published on 21 May 2021. He said he founded Rhizomatiks with classmates from the Tokyo University of Science and from IAMAS, the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Gifu, where he studied afterwards. In the early years, he said, the group earned money by making websites and advertisements and spent it on its own experimental projects with technology, and from 2010 requests from manufacturing, entertainment and advertising companies allowed more of that experimental work.

The engineer Motoi Ishibashi came in after the founding. In the same interview he said he joined the team later and has worked with Manabe and others on research and development and experimental projects. Wikipedia says Ishibashi studied control systems engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology before IAMAS, where he met Manabe, and that the two have co-directed Rhizomatiks Research since 2015.

Three divisions, then a new company name.

The collective’s structure has changed twice in public. For its tenth anniversary it held the exhibition Rhizomatiks 10 at Spiral Garden in Tokyo from 19 to 30 April 2017. AdverTimes reported that, as its next step, the company had divided into three: Research, pursuing expression and research and development and opening up entertainment work; Architecture, putting forward new ideas of architecture; and Design, building digital solutions. AdverTimes later dated the three divisions to 2016, the tenth year. The anniversary show also sold Rhizomatiks merchandise made with Tokyo Cultuart by BEAMS, including hoodies, T-shirts, mugs and stickers.

The larger change was announced in 2020. AdverTimes reported on 2 November 2020 that Rhizomatiks, then led by Saito as representative director, would rename the company Abstract Engine and set up two teams inside it, Rhizomatiks and Panoramatiks. The report said Flowplateaux, a company founded in 2019 to handle mainly client work, would sit alongside as an affiliated company. It gave the reason as the growing scale of the group’s work, much of it now in public space, as data and computing reshaped society.

The new company name has its own source. AdverTimes said “Abstract Engine” comes from the idea of abstract machines cited by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; the company chose “engine” rather than “machine” because it wanted to act as a social power source that produces force. In its 26 March 2021 report, the magazine confirmed that the company name had changed to Abstract Engine in January 2021, the year of the collective’s fifteenth anniversary.

The name Rhizomatiks did not disappear. The collective’s English-language website, read in October 2026, lists Rhizomatiks, Flowplateaux, Panoramatiks and Abstract Engine side by side in its header, and gives Abstract Engine Co., Ltd. as the company behind the site. It describes Rhizomatiks as a creative collective focused on research-driven and experimental projects, working with outside artists, creators, researchers and scientists.

One root name, several shoots.

Digital and interactive studios rarely have a product on a shelf, so the name and the website carry the identity work. Many of the names are made up rather than descriptive: a word with a numeral attached, a film-industry term borrowed and hyphenated, a phrase that hints at a way of working. The same name can also be written several ways over the years. Trade magazines may print it in lower case while the studio’s own site sets it in capitals, and a hyphen or a numeral can become a distinctive part of the mark.

The studio website is usually the main brand surface. It works as a portfolio, with full-screen video and case studies in front and the typography kept plain. Office cities are often written as short codes along the top of the page, and project credits, director rosters and archives are treated as part of the brand, because they show who made what and when.

These identities also change shape as the business changes. Studios open and close offices, split a film arm from an agency, or fold their work into new ventures under the original name. When reading them, look at how the name is set across the website, the credits and the trade press, how the studio lists its cities, and what it keeps from earlier eras in its archive.

Dance, data and the museum, dated.

Rhizomatiks’ work reaches the public mainly as dated performances and exhibitions. Wikipedia says its early projects included work with the pop group Perfume on the single “Polyrhythm” in 2007, and that in 2014 it appeared with the dance company ELEVENPLAY at the Festival Internacional Cervantino. In the 2021 interview, Manabe set short, jam-session-like music videos for Björk and Squarepusher apart from long research collaborations with Perfume, ELEVENPLAY and the kyogen actor Mansai Nomura, in which the team builds a shared language over time. He named border, made with ELEVENPLAY in 2015 and shown in a new version in 2021, as the work that made him recognise the boundaries between digital and analogue and between virtual and real.

Manabe also described the method behind the work. He said Rhizomatiks projects are usually data-driven, starting with data: with dancers, the team begins by capturing their movements and then works out how to turn that data into images and sound. He cited traders, shown in 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, which visualised real-time transaction data from the Tokyo Stock Exchange alongside data from automated trading software.

The same museum gave the collective a solo exhibition in its fifteenth year. AdverTimes reported on 26 March 2021 that rhizomatiks_multiplex had opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, with parts of it streamed online. It included a new installation, Rhizomatiks × ELEVENPLAY “multiplex”, built from ELEVENPLAY dancers’ motion data with video projection and moving robotics, and an updated version of particles, a work from 2011, installed in the museum’s atrium. Ishibashi said in May 2021 that the show also included an archive meant to let visitors see the trial and error behind finished pieces.

Sport and stage work continued. Wikipedia says that in 2023 Rhizomatiks worked with the figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu on his solo ice show “Gift” at Tokyo Dome, and the collective’s website lists Perfume’s anniversary show “Nebula Romance” at Tokyo Dome among its 2025 work.

For a design guide, Rhizomatiks shows how a coined name can carry a whole idea of organisation — a root with many shoots — and survive a change of company name around it. Compare teamLab, another Tokyo collective joining art and engineering, and Resn, an interactive studio in this collection. For this guide we use laser green, signal grey and stage black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Rhizomatiks’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.