This exhibition is a ritual in which the artist, the viewer, and AI collaborate to summon new yokai through haiku. The artist breaks apart renku (5/7/5) created through an automatic-writing-like process, and the viewer freely creates a haiku (5/7/5) from those multiple words. The haiku formed from the viewer’s chosen combination is rewritten by ChatGPT into a 50-word English poem. The English poem is then read by an image-generation AI that imitates Takakura’s style, summoning a new yokai. As soon as it is born, the yokai is released into the online world, destined to become an NFT bearing the name of the haiku. This exhibition reconsiders the themes that Surrealism pursued through the lens of contemporary AI. Generative AIs such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion learn from vast archives of all human knowledge from around the world available on the internet, and output text and images through a kind of imagination that is not human. Isn’t this a mode of access very close to the Surrealists’ attempts to reach the human unconscious at the height of Surrealism? Rather than accessing dreams or the inner world of the unconscious, contemporary humanity uses the internet to access the archive of all humankind, and with the help of AI, a nonhuman imagination, makes choices through what might be called an “unconscious consciousness.” In this exhibition, the imaginative powers of the artist, the viewer, and AI, placed side by side, perform a ritual to summon countless new “yokai” as “nonexistent (digital) beings” in the form of NFTs online. May 2023: ver. 1.0 exhibited at NEORT++ September 2023: ver. 2.0 exhibited at art stage osaka March 2024: ver. 3.0 exhibited at Ashikaga Museum of Art

Because the illustration had a strong 2D color style that emphasized lines, the background graphics were designed in contrast to that, using a stage-like approach with no outlines. For the lyrics, we created a flowing typeface inspired by the cursive script of the Japanese version.

This is my reel I have created as a freelancer!​​​​​​​ A reel of the works I have been involved in as a motion designer can be found below. https://hiromuoka.com/worksplus If you would like to know the password, please contact the following address. okatheponjuice@gmail.com If you are interested in collaborating, please let me know. I look forward to hearing from you!

“Those seeds you sowed will surely sprout. When our sprouts finally emerge, let’s celebrate together.” I spent two years steadily creating this 1 minute 46 second piece. I drew everything with a pen tablet, without using 3DCG or rotoscoping. I drew it while observing and researching many things. I would be delighted if something were to sprout in the hearts of everyone who watched it.

By crossing over three different modes of expression—reality, fantasy, and drama—I directed the work to capture “Que Sera, Sera,” or “it will all work out,” from every perspective. I explored new reactions that arise by blending things that seem unlikely to intersect: a fabricated story, a documentary that is not fabricated, and a god’s world created with CG.

Using as many varied techniques as possible, including 8mm film, puppet animation, and 3DCG, I created this work while channeling its musical ideas into the atmosphere of interwar Europe. I designed the music video with the interpretation that it is about dreams, and about how one faces and keeps one’s distance from the people and world around them.

I was in charge of the pixel animation for the promotional video for Audio-Technica’s record player “SOUND BURGER,” directed and produced by the visual design studio WOW, which is based in Tokyo, Sendai, London, and San Francisco. This is a promotional video for a new color version released in 2023, following the model’s revival in 2022 after about 40 years. Under the communication message “SAVE THE VINYLS,” the story unfolds as SOUND BURGER, which first appeared in the 1980s, travels through time to return to the present day in order to save records that are no longer being listened to. The music was produced by music producer TORIENA.

blender

Opening movie for the smartphone game app Break My Case. Featuring the motifs of “the lights of a city shining at night” and “threads weaving destiny,” it expresses an urban, stylish world.

“Feel free to do anything as long as it’s not obscene.” With that request, I made sure the world of the music and the poem, its mood, and its forms would become as strange and disjointed as possible. The references I drew on were works that feel feverish and nightmarish to watch, such as Stephen King’s The Devil Truck, Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, and Ken Russell’s Gothic. Above all, I wanted to express the absurdity of a gigantic thing racing at full speed, and the image of something that crosses some kind of limit or is mixed together until it turns into an uncanny form. If you trace the history of Gothic, from the Christian view of life and death to the monsters like gargoyles placed on church Gothic architecture, there is a sense of life and death repeating like summer and winter. I am always drawn to the coexistence of ambivalent things. The zombie in the passenger seat is always embodying the ambivalent state of life and death. Though dead, he wears a T-shirt that says “flesh and blood,” or gets an IV drip, as if he refuses to accept death. The method is my usual collage, but it is difficult to create something without straying from the world I have set up. The shape of the truck, on which I put special emphasis, also has to maintain a certain level of consistency from the front, the diagonal, and the side in order to connect properly. A lack of consistency is in a sense an inherent quality of collage, but this nauseating lack of balance was the most exciting and enjoyable part of my recent work.