海野林太郎

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

Based on the song’s energy and its distinctive rhythm, which can also sound like festival music, the piece was directed and produced around the theme of a “new festival” that brings together all kinds of cultures and elements. Combining a wide range of visuals—fragmentary situations and scenes that Hasegawa Hakushi himself associated with the song and selected, the powerful dance performance by Yoon Ji, a dancer active in Korea, the charming yet quirky characters and animation by Sawako Kageyama, Rintaro Unno’s keenly observed live-action footage of reality, and graphic design inspired by fireworks—it depicts an unknown festival and the excitement of its rising energy as elements that seem at first to be disconnected, blending reality and unreality, merge together.