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 Each pixel of the company logo has been replaced by one pushpin to bring physical presence to the iconic symbol.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” 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

Each photo is made out of 405 photos of the 405 freeway in Los Angeles.

Selected Exhibitions and Honors

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

Over the past century, it has become ordinary to experience motion pictures on large screens in movie theaters or as video projections. These modern projection instruments developed from what was called the “Magic Lantern,” invented in Europe during the second half of the 17th century. While the Magic Lantern was invented in the West, it influenced the emergence of a new type of entertainment in 18th century Japan known as “Utsushi-e.” Utsushi-e was an original hybrid of the ancient Asian shadow play and the Western Magic Lantern show. It can be considered a close ancestor of movies, preceding them by a mere century. In Utsushi-e, instead of merely projecting series of pre-fabricated images on a screen, artists created ‘motion pictures’ via a mixture of live art, light manipulation, narration and painted images. Artists built upon audience response; an interaction developed between the two.

“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.

This work does not intend to offer a common point of reflection for all to understand and cherish. Rather, the piece intends to evoke personal memories that are strongly tied to the four seasons, interpreted through a Japanese cultural perspective. Through the presented vignettes, this piece vividly brings back those personal memories, presenting them as a unified experience.

Selected Exhibitoins and Honors

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

Selected Exhibitoins and Honors

Artistic Motivation

Catharsis
The installation The King Has… gave individuals the opportunity to unburden themselves of kept secrets, kept secrets being a source of stress relieved through disclosure. The project explored the types of secrets individuals would be willing to reveal under the veil of anonymity. At what point is sharing something private with the world more important than the risk of being discovered?

Public Space
Critical to our installation was the idea of activating a public space to engage as diverse a population as possible. With a homogenous population we were worried that individuals would be excessively concerned about being discovered, resulting in fewer, safer secrets. By mounting our secrets on building façades and in turn engaging the street we were guaranteed a diverse audience and correspondingly braver submissions.

Materials
Submitted secrets were printed on uniformly cut panels of wood. Key to the decision to print on wood rather than paper was the depth and weight wood gave the submissions: wood panels made each secret an epitaph.

For our construction site installation panels were cut as large as our printer would accommodate (US letter) to block surrounding advertising and create a halo of focus around each secret. For our building façade installation panels were cut to the size of the structure’s bricks, giving the impression that secrets were gradually enveloping the façade, revealing hidden life.

Conclusion
Prior to developing The King Has… 50 people were surveyed in an effort to understand whether or not they would be comfortable revealing repressed secrets anonymously in a public space. Many were, however our choice of installation sites and our decision to seed our sites with our own secrets were the result of trying to make people as comfortable as possible to ensure the success of the installation.

The most gratifying aspect of the installation was witnessing firsthand the reactions of those engaging the piece. Numerous people stopped to point, read, and share text, touch the panels, and submit their own secrets, validating decisions made about installation location and materials.

Technical Details
Installation Sites
For the Los Angels launch of The King Has… two installation sites with heavy foot traffic were chosen. The first installation was mounted on building scaffolding at a construction site in Downtown Los Angeles—as urban as the city gets—with the second mounted on the façade of a UCLA building in pedestrian-oriented Westwood.

Specially colored panels were produced with instructions on how to submit secrets. Installation sites were also seeded with 4 true secrets to help jump-start submissions.

Each installation site engaged a different audience. The Downtown site engaged a largely working-class Latino community including many children high school-aged and younger. While we received a minimal number of messages from this audience we witnessed numerous individuals touching the panels, validating our decision to use wood as our medium.

The Westwood site was visited by a number of college students as well as UCLA faculty and Westwood professionals. Passers-by took the time to stop and read the panels, with many subsequently contributing their own secrets.

Receiving Secrets
We decided that forcing individuals to enter secrets via a Web site was a bad idea for four reasons:

First, doing so would have allowed those who had never visited the installation sites the opportunity to submit secrets. The project was about omni-directional sharing: we thought it critical to engage passers-by as they were reading the secrets of others.

Second, we wanted people to submit secrets spontaneously, rather than having to copy a URL, return home, and craft a statement.

Third, we wanted people to exert a small amount of effort in sending secrets to discourage spamming and casual secret fabrication (of course secrets were submitted anonymously so it was impossible to truly distinguish fact from fiction).

Lastly, we wanted to give people who did not own a computer or have access to one the opportunity to engage the installation.

For these reasons we decided to use SMS messaging—a service available to virtually every cell phone user—as our secret sharing mechanism.

Our SMS system consisted of a pay-per-use cell phone with Bluetooth and custom software written in Perl and AppleScript. The application BluePhoneElite was used to pull secrets off of the cell phone via Bluetooth as they were received. Pulled secrets were formatted to fit the size of the wood panel specific to the installation site. If a secret fit the panel size a reminder SMS was sent to the sender with the location of the installation site, otherwise an SMS was sent to the sender requesting a shorter submission.

Successfully formatted secrets were automatically saved to PDF and e-mailed to an installation-specific e-mail account for printing. Secrets were also converted to JPEG format and archived online at http://www.thekinghas.com for perusal by those not able to visit the installation sites.

Slab Printer
New secrets were printed nightly on a slab printer built from 3 identical HP inkjet printers. Red ink was mixed by hand to aesthetically complement the color of the wood panels.

To create the slab printer the bottom of one of the printers was removed and mounted on a wooden bed. Stepper motors from the other two printers were mounted at opposite ends of the bed, with a belt stretched between them acting as a conveyor. The modified printer was capable of printing on panels up to half of an inch thick at page sizes up to US letter (8.5 in. x 11 in.).

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.

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. Although many of us open and close window blinds daily, we hardly think about them or their operation. The act has become automated. Open the Blind redefines the window blind as a computer interface through a trick that while seemingly simple opens up undiscloses possibilities of perception, deception and revelation, unleashing an uncanny game of hide and seek.

The image of a lady changing clothes is seen projected on the blind. The silhouette image entices visitors to see more. When the visitor turns the wand to open the blind, the action is detected by an embedded sensor. Instead of the image of a naked lady, the image of the visitor him/herself in the act of trying to peep is projected as a frozen image. With Open the Blind the visitor is unexpectedly forced to experience his/her own reflection. The voyeuristic experience is reversed, and momentarily frozen, the visitor caught in the act. The action also brings the blind interface to the foreground, changing its nature. Simultaneously the illusion of silhouette is shattered in a surprising but also humorous way.

Selected exhibitions and Honors

Programming Support : Osman Khan
Actress : Morrow Pettigrew
Video Documentation Support : Krister Olsson
Construction Support : Dawn Kasper

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.

Selected Screenings and Honors

Produced by Masa Inakage Lab, Keio University