As a Japanese creative/citizen I wanted to do something for people who were affected by this tragedy, and I made a simple but utilitarian Red Cross Ribbon widget.

You can install the ribbon just by coping one JavaScript code to your website, just like how you embed YouTube video to your blog/website. And the ribbon links to the Red Cross Japan relief donation page.

Only after a couple of days of the launch, hundreds of blogs/websites have installed the widget and it has about 15,0000 ribbon loads a day.

I’d very much appreciate your support for Japan.

Please learn more about this project at http://supportjapan.info

One Pixel One Pushpin

“One Pixel One Pushpin” is a drawing work that creates a representation of Google’s company logo. Each pixel of the company logo has been replaced by one pushpin to bring physical presence to the iconic symbol. Then, the images of the piece were converted into an interactive map to allow visitors online to experience the work. The artist’s intent was to allow people to physically experience pixels, the atomic unit for visual digital communications. The project explores the relationship between the digital and physical spaces in which we live.

http://onepixelonepushpin.com

Ten Thousand Cents

“Ten Thousand Cents” is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction

www.tenthousandcents.com

in collaboration with Aaron Koblin

Selected exhibitions and Honors

Ordinary View in the City of Angeles

“Ordinary View in the City of Angeles” is a photo series of the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, infamously the freeway with the most traffic in the US. It explores the duality of beauty by expressing people’s preconceived idyllic notions of Los Angeles through the medium of the car, which residents socially and physically suffer from daily without notice.

I Love LA

Everybody is Dreaming

2 Wheel Drive

the City of Angeles

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Takashi’s Seasons

“Takashi’s Seasons” is a sequential live shadow puppet / video performance in which various scenes interpreting the four seasons are performed by a modern Utsushi-e artist. In the spring children are seen walking back to school with their school bags (the academic year begins in April in Japan). The proud performance of cicadas can be heard on a hot summer evening. Dragonflies smoothly glide in the cool air of a fall afternoon. On New Year’s Eve the chimes of temple bells are heard in the freezing winter night.

Collaboration with Togo Kida and Yoshimasa Niwa

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The King Has…

The installation “The King Has…” offers individuals the opportunity to anonymously unburden themselves of secrets responsible for producing unnecessary stress. Through the public revealing of these secrets a larger discourse is facilitated about their content, and at a macro level, why the secrets were “secrets” in the first place.

www.thekinghas.com

in collaboration with Krister Olsson

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Open the Blind, Dec. 2004

Open the Blind is an interactive installation that raises issues about voyeurism and our desires related to peeping. It also explores new kinds of interfaces by re-functionalizing things we encounter in our everyday environments, but often go unnoticed.

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e g g

Animated typography plays on the similarity between the characters ‘e’ + ‘g’. Each character rotates at ramdom speed. Upon synchronization as the word “e g g”, each of them becomes an egg and eventually, starts to rotate again. Although preview videos are NTSC resolution, for gallery exhibition the animation is presented as a high resolution, computer controlled, real-time moving image.

Programming Suport : Krister Olsson, Tatsuya Saito

Gateball

In a small Japanese town, a gateball championship final reaches supernatural proportions.

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