Science advances by asking “why?”, letting our imaginations grow into hypotheses, and repeating experiments while believing in those hypotheses. “Discovery Wall” was created as a warm-up before entering the Basic Exhibition Room at the Fukuoka City Science Museum, to encourage visitors to question everything and let their imaginations run free. To inspire people to explore with curiosity—wondering “What happens if I touch this picture?” or “What does this picture mean?”—we incorporated many intriguing devices into the content, based on events in the history of science and scientific phenomena, and freely imagined by animation creators. When you touch the reliefs, science and imagination burst forth as delightful animations. Each one connects and interacts, eventually converging into the question: “Why?”

Commissioned to create an installation for the masterpiece Alice in Wonderland, I wanted to create a space where visitors could feel as if they had entered the mysterious world within the story. The various unbelievable events Alice experiences are wondrous, but at the same time they are filled with the intellectual curiosity and excitement we felt as children—thoughts like “Wouldn’t it be great if this happened?” and “What if this happened?” For the installation, we wrote down countless “wouldn’t it be great if...” ideas and exchanged many proposals, and in the end we decided on the concept of John Tenniel’s beautiful illustrations coming to life and moving in response to the viewer. The small 2.5-meter-square room was designed as a “special place for connecting with Alice’s world.” Inside the 14 frames hanging on the walls are iPads, each displaying a character from Alice’s story. Based on John Tenniel’s original illustrations, 3D model data was created for the characters, and through shader programming, real-time image processing makes them look like paintings drawn with hatching techniques, so at first glance they appear to be ordinary framed artworks. When a person stands on the carpet in the center of the room, a Kinect v2 sensor detects their pose, and all the characters in the frames slowly begin to move and “mimic” the person’s stance. The playfulness that fills Alice’s world contains many suggestions for the way we live and work today. Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argued that “play” is the essence of human activity and the source from which culture arises. French philosopher Roger Caillois developed this view of humanity, identifying mimicry, meaning “imitation,” as one of the four fundamental elements of play, and noting that it played a particularly important role in primitive societies. In addition, in Mozart, Hideo Kobayashi points out that Mozart was a genius of imitation, and that his original music was born out of imitation. We can discover many things through play and develop culture. We created this work in the hope that many people, through the story of Alice and this exhibition, would feel the importance of filling everyday life with more play.