Method: Stop motion I created this piece while sharing backgrounds and characters with Moji Tsuchiya, each of us imitating the other’s characters. Tsuchiya created the basic storyboard, and we worked out the overall feel of the film by sharing the footage as it was completed. There is a Go scene in the video, and it felt like we were making it while watching each other’s moves, as though I were playing Go with Tsuchiya.

Responsible for the art direction and CGI production of the TV commercial for Amazon Japan’s Autumn Early Sale. Based on Amazon Japan’s brand image, the changing seasonal feeling from summer to autumn was designed through the color palette, as well as the use of light and shadow.

The work titled “FAKE” (Fig. 49) was created based on the artist’s own experience of false memory. It tells the story of a boy who is afraid of water because he remembers having nearly drowned as a child. However, that memory is false. The one who actually drowned at that time was his friend.

Original animation Mr. Neko, an animation director, and his assistant Nezukun work together making animations, but their work never seems to go as smoothly as they’d like. This animation depicts the everyday lives of Mr. Neko and Nezukun, with Mr. Neko, an animation creator, modeled on the artist himself. New works are being posted regularly on X.

Inspired by the song’s theme of “the grown-up ‘I’ remembering ‘you’ in memories that have already slipped away and seem about to disappear,” I expanded on that idea and created this work with the aim of resonating with the generation born in the 2000s, who are only just becoming adults. While incorporating the technique of compositing animation onto footage shot with a 3DS, I also mixed in contemporary graphic expressions and footage shot with a cinema camera, in order to convey the difference between the way the world looks in childhood and in the early twenties.

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

This is a co-directed work with Hideyuki Kojima. Based on the world of papercraft, we carefully shot the film in stop motion, moving through a series of scenes: first, Chukyo-kun and motifs from Aichi, Mie, and Gifu are cut out from paper to create a flat world; then Chukyo-kun transforms into a three-dimensional form, creating a more tactile, dimensional world; and finally, the perspective expands further as the paper world bursts into live action. The transition from the paper hand to the live-action hand was actually filmed in reverse order from what appears on screen. We first shot the stop-motion hand, then converted the hand footage into contour data and cut it out from paper, and finally replaced the paper hand and shot it again in stop motion. Lighting was also quite challenging. Because all of the paper used was the same “white,” if we didn’t use subtle changes in light to create shadows and convey depth, shadow color, and distance between objects, it would simply become an all-white world. We carefully crafted the lighting so that, no matter where you paused the video, it would form a beautiful still image. The live-action scenery is the familiar Nagoya Port. That scene was also done in stop motion, and we shot it while praying for clear weather. On the day of filming, it was a violent storm like a typhoon, and just when we thought everything was hopeless, we carried the camera up to the rooftop—and somehow, the sky cleared up all at once. It was a strange and wonderful moment.

Music video for "Nuts Cracker" by Gero × Meichan × Teniwoha The visuals were crafted with a retro illustration-inspired look, using the texture of the footage and 3DCG to enhance the imagery.

Introducing Isel’s technology related to cultivable cellulose materials, refined over 100 years.

“The fact that I can’t get up” — is it my body that won’t rise? No. Not being able to get up was a mental refusal, a rejection of wanting to get up. If that is the case, I may as well give up on getting up, focus on the body lying down, and surrender myself to pure sensation alone. It feels almost like being an infant. I sink into the inside of my eyes, deep behind the retina. And then, what do I find? A soft, baby-like, comforting sensation. Breathing in, a warm heartbeat, the texture of a blanket. It was as if it were stimulating opioid receptors, blending sedation and awakening. The hidden children inside me seemed to have awakened. The ringing alarm clock leads me into a dream. Spreading opioids. A revolving merry-go-round bed. Entering inward, behind the eyes, deep, deep behind the retina. The soft infant awakens. text by ITOAOI

Works by nim up to now.