A rapidly shifting urban landscape — waves of people, railway networks, buildings, and city lights generate an immense torrent of information. This work intensifies that “excess” through visual techniques such as slit-scan and delay, making the speed and density of changing information visible. Screened at “Toki-no-ma,” an immersive gallery created through the adaptive reuse of the former Hino Junior High School in Hino Town, Tottori Prefecture. Presented in the first opening program, “A Classroom Where the City and Satoyama Intersect.”

Inspired by Nedu, Hino Town, where the sound of water fills the town. An installation work in which overlapping streams of water envelop the space. At Tokinoma, an immersive gallery in Hino Town, Tottori Prefecture, housed in a repurposed former school, we held the special exhibition “A Classroom Where the City and Satoyama Intersect.” As one of the screening works in the exhibition above, this piece focuses on “satoyama,” and abstractly expresses both its beauty and the issues present in the region.

WOW participated in the signature pavilion “null²” at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai as part of the creator team, contributing to the planning, visuals, sound, and overall direction system. The pavilion’s theme is “Polishing Life.” WOW joined as a direction member from the earliest planning stages and, together with Expo producer Yoichi Ochiai, spent several years creating a wide range of creative elements, from the pavilion’s interior visuals, sound, robot control, and experiential flow to the exterior visuals. A Pulsating Sculpture, a Conversational Space For this pavilion, Ochiai established “two mirrors” as a key concept. The first refers to the sculpture itself, which generates unfamiliar landscapes. Its mirror-finished exterior absorbs the surrounding scenery, pulsating as it repeatedly transforms like a living organism, even as a building. The second refers to the experience inside the pavilion. In a space where mirrors and imagery are integrated, visitors confront “kigō*” and engage in dialogue with a digital human. WOW was primarily responsible for this interior experience. The space confronting “kigō” is a cube measuring 8 meters in width, depth, and height, with mirrored surfaces on all sides. Projection systems on the ceiling, floor, and walls, together with a vertical video object called the “Monolith” standing at the center, work in response to one another to depict “kigō,” creating endless reflections. In addition, the cube-shaped mirrored “goshintai,” which symbolizes the space, moves freely overhead, shifting perspectives and stirring the visitor’s mind and thoughts. Using mirrors as a medium, the experience moves back and forth between meaning and matter, self and other, reality and virtuality, encouraging visitors to reconsider and reinterpret what life is and offering a prompt to “polish life.” *Elements that constitute a person’s individuality, such as their name, hobbies, preferences, voice, and appearance Two Types of Experiences, Two Different Perspectives The experience is offered in two modes: “Dialogue Mode” and “Installation Mode.” Dialogue Mode centers on the world of “computational nature,” as proposed by Ochiai, and the story connected to it, allowing visitors to let go of their “kigō” through verbal communication. In Installation Mode, visitors view simple patterned visuals, along with the Monolith and goshintai moving throughout the space, from the outer corridor, creating a non-verbal experience that lets them intuitively sense the structures at the essence of life. In both experiences, the story, visuals, sound, goshintai, and Monolith are all intricately linked, so WOW worked closely with Ochiai to craft a precise direction. Direction Where Technology and Expression Merge On the technical side, to create a more three-dimensional and densely layered experience, WOW integrated a wide range of direction elements, including AI-generated real-time video, display of 3D Gaussian splatting, sound generation, image effects, as well as the display and speech of MirroredBodies created by visitors in a dedicated app, and robot control for the goshintai and Monolith. In collaboration with various companies, WOW developed the main system that aggregates and controls these elements. In addition, the carefully designed sound direction, which makes use of characteristics across different frequency ranges, contributed to a unique auditory experience. Logo Design and Design Guidelines That Create Organic Expression WOW also handled the logo design for null². For the dynamic logo, multiple fonts were used to create a design that transforms into various forms. The static logo was refined from the dynamic logo as the official version. In both cases, the aim was to maintain a certain degree of legibility while pursuing a fluid, life-like design tone through verification and rule setting. In this project, the participating teams, including WOW, brought together all of their technical capabilities and creativity to create the work “null²,” something that could only have been realized at the Expo.

WOW participated in the BLUE OCEAN DOME at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai. At this pavilion, where visitors can learn about the sustainable use of marine resources and the protection of marine ecosystems, WOW was responsible for the direction and production of the video content. BLUE OCEAN DOME consists of three spaces under the theme of “the revival of the ocean.” It includes an installation expressing the spectrum of water, a video installation depicting the miracles and crises of Earth as the planet of water, and a space that presents a path toward restoring the ocean through documentary footage. WOW developed a hemispherical LED visual device about 10 meters in diameter together with Azlab. Through this one-of-a-kind, ultra-high-definition giant hemispherical LED screen, it brought Earth as seen from space to life. —The beautiful Earth, a miraculous water planet, is on the verge of being gravely damaged by human activity. This work depicts the ocean, where the brilliance of the chain of life and pollution progress simultaneously, across a range of scales from a vast view like looking at Earth from space to the cellular level. By fusing realistic depictions so true to life they could be mistaken for the real thing with dreamlike imagination, the piece sought to create an audiovisual experience as a “device for transforming consciousness” that appeals to the senses of visitors. The footage, supervised after fieldwork in biologically diverse marine areas and by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, vividly portrays everything from vibrant life to the realities of marine pollution through the meticulously crafted 3DCG for which WOW is known. In addition, Hatis Noit’s voice, resonating as if with the voices of all beings living in the sea, gave the imagery multidimensional depth. The hemispherical screen, covered by a parabolic cover, was precisely designed down to the number and arrangement of its supports, realizing two distortion-free curved surfaces. For the parabolic cover serving as the backdrop for the LED screen, a special paint that appears darker than black by absorbing light was used. A smooth base finish achieved through plasterwork and painstaking hand-applied painting created a jet-black screening space. The hemispherical screen itself was fabricated by hand, one small panel at a time. This ultra-high-definition display, with approximately 160,000 LED chips arranged at a 2.5 mm pitch, supported the overwhelming visual experience.

This work, presented on August 13, 2025 at the “Neo Lantern Festival” held in Hino Town, Hino District, Tottori Prefecture, simultaneously unfolded a visual presentation and an illumination design that enveloped the entire space. Set in an old warehouse once used for storing rice, it repurposed a dormant space and transformed it into a place that connects local memory with the future. The illumination is not merely decorative; it is an essential element that shapes the rhythm of the space in response to the imagery. Light placed along the walls and beams overlaps with the abstract layers of the video, spreading outward as if embracing the audience’s bodily sense. In a space where the festival’s defining “light” and the installation’s illumination coexist, the traditional light of the festival and the light of contemporary digital art intersected. The theme of the work is “reconstructing the landscape.” It captures fragments of nature and daily life from the Hino District (Hino Town, Kofu Town, and Nichinan Town), then reassembles them into abstract designs. The video evokes memories of the landscape, while the illumination serves to extend those memories throughout the entire space. Viewers can experience the moment when the familiar appearance of the land is transformed by light and imagery, discovering another kind of beauty hidden within the region’s scenery. Underlying the work is a desire to reuse local resources and foster cultural regeneration. By reviving an unused rice warehouse as an art venue, it became an attempt to create new value that honors memories of the past while opening toward the future. The closed-off space of the warehouse was opened up, creating a place where local people could share an experience of being surrounded by light. This installation functions as a mediator that connects land, people, and memory through the unity of video, illumination, and the local community.

I have continued working on cross-disciplinary production, such as pictorial images with cinematic qualities and painterly animation. This work, *Sandbox*, is an experiment in replacing painting and animation with a game engine. In this work, I used a game engine to create an “electronic sculpture” and attempted to visualize a non-tactile sense of reality. By following afterimages that traverse space, it aims to unsettle the viewer’s bodily perception. At the same time, an autoplay function was built in so that the game would assimilate into the environment like ambient music, becoming a “passive game / background game.” It is an interaction/installation in which the viewer/player can seamlessly move back and forth between “play,” controlled with a controller, and “viewing,” without using a controller.

Stone, camera, and display are suspended in a straight line. While the camera and the display each perform pendulum motions with different phases, they capture and present the stone in real time. The motionless stone, within this linkage, is constantly transformed as an image. What emerges here is not the movement of the object itself, but a relational fluctuation made visible by the phase difference between the apparatuses. While identification with the camera draws the subject as an “eye” into the interior of the image, the movement of the screen pulls it back into physical space as a body subject to gravity. The shift produced by the asynchronous movements of the camera and the screen, in this back-and-forth, gently suspends the very framework of seeing itself.

A display suspended by wire ropes continues its back-and-forth rotational motion according to the principle of a torsion pendulum. The screen shows footage shot while circling a motionless stone. The rotating display and the camera that captured the footage have different periods, and their relationship repeatedly shifts between synchronization and asynchronization. Within this, two appearances emerge in the image: the motion of circling around the stone, and the motion in which the stone itself appears to be rotating. Through both, the work moves between an optical/distant mode of visual experience, which has assumed identification with another point of view, and a tactile/near mode of visual experience that comes into presence through the viewer’s bodily involvement.

Description: This video installation consists of a display that moves up and down and footage of falling rocks projected onto it. The work addresses three spatial dimensions: the “space of images” created by the video, the “real space” in which it is viewed, and the “virtual space” that connects them. In cinema, events and spaces outside the frame are called “off-screen,” and their presence is suggested through sound or the reactions of characters. However, in the contemporary age, where video experiences through computer multi-window displays have become commonplace, it is also possible to recognize the video content itself as an object off-screen. In this work, the bodily act of following the moving display with one’s eyes, together with the reciprocal experience of the video in response, evokes the singular event of “falling rocks.” Yet the visual synchronization/asynchronization produced by the mismatch between the movement of the display and the rhythm of the video continually shifts the perceived location of the object in our minds. Where, exactly, is the stone falling?

Main entrance We were responsible for directing and producing video content, including the eight-screen digital signage installed at the main entrance and exhibition explanatory videos for each area. To avoid distracting from the exhibition experience, we carefully designed videos that were easy to understand and unobtrusive, minimizing decorative flourishes as much as possible.

At the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Tokyo, which reopened on March 31, 2026, we produced three works—“Traditional GRID,” “Moving Picture,” and “Another Sky”—as part of the permanent video projection program presented in the Edo-Tokyo Plaza on the third floor. Cultural resources held by the Edo-Tokyo Museum, such as ukiyo-e prints and maps, have been reimagined not as objects to be viewed, but as a spatial experience that envelops visitors. Approximately 100 works by ukiyo-e artists and painters, including Katsushika Hokusai and Tōshūsai Sharaku, unfold overhead as landscapes connected to modern-day Tokyo. Crossing the memories of cultural properties, architecture, and the city, this project seeks not only to “exhibit” history, but to give it form as an experience that visitors can physically অনুভ in the scale of this place. Projection screening schedule in the third-floor Edo-Tokyo Plaza (from May 2026) Times: 19:00, 19:20, 19:40

This work is a kinetic installation that prompts us to question what we perceive as “materiality” and “reality” by giving droplets movement and evoking a sense of water that differs from the forms of water we encounter in everyday life. By blending the “waterness” of water itself with the “waterness” suggested by its form and movement, it creates both the familiar and the unfamiliar image of water. Because water is such a familiar substance in our daily lives, we know its behavior through everyday experience. The appearance of water, which sometimes seems almost biological and at other times animated, produces a gap between it and the water we know. The work was exhibited at Ars Electronica in 2024, and presented as a solo exhibition at art space kimura ASK? P in February 2025.

An audiovisual installation composed of five wide displays and a 3D sensor. The displays show a 3D model of the artist generated using volumetric capture technology, continuously casting its gaze in various directions. In this work, the vertices of the viewing frustum that constitutes the perspective of the image are always set along the extension of that gaze, so the viewer continually experiences dynamic anamorphosis (distorted imagery). However, only when the viewer’s viewpoint is tracked and the 3D model turns its gaze toward that position—that is, only when the viewer and the 3D model “meet each other’s eyes”—does a single integrated space emerge across display planes oriented in different directions. Invented in the 15th century, perspective drawing has continued to exert a strong influence on dualistic ways of understanding the world, centered on the subject/object divide. In this work, by making the reciprocity of the gaze a condition for the existence of virtual space, those boundaries and hierarchical relationships are dissolved, while the visual experience that arises there presents a current reality in which multiple dimensions coexist.

For the production, CG and generative AI were used in tandem, and the work was developed by designing structure, light, and material qualities while also incorporating forms and movements that emerged accidentally. In the end, the piece was composed, edited, and color-corrected across multiple tools, aiming for a visual expression in which human intention and the unpredictability of algorithms coexist.

An audiovisual work that encounters the extraordinary within reality through a form of water that differs from everyday experience. Using water droplets, this work draws on the phenomena and properties of droplets while uncovering a dynamic form of water that differs from the ordinary. From both visual and auditory perspectives, it explores the presence of an extraordinary substance within the everyday, and offers an experience in which the viewer and the water droplets coexist, sharing the same space and time.

BATHVERSE, opened in Shinagawa, Tokyo by Nipoli Chemical Industries, a manufacturer specializing in unit bathrooms. It transforms the expanded sense of rising from soaking in hot water into an immersive spatial experience, enveloped by six screens, a mirrored floor, and three-dimensional sound.