Skip City, a combined museum of visual media and science museum complex in Saitama, Japan. Skip City is home to curious scientific devices and historic filming equipment, but because it is located far from the city center, it remains little known. “What is Skip City?” Its appeal can only be understood by going there, and this was expressed through animation.

I made this as a self-produced 2D animation with the concept of just having fun and being silly. I tried to make it as visually interesting as possible, not just in terms of content. The artwork was created in Photoshop, and the animation was done in After Effects.

“Running water never stops and never remains the same. Bubbles floating in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, never stay long. People and their dwellings in this world are likewise...” Calligrapher Mariko Kinoshita selected and inscribed a passage from Kamo no Chomei’s Hojoki, then divided the calligraphy into square pieces herself. Based on these segmented cells, video artist Shinichi Yamamoto assigned a time axis, and musician Corey Fuller further created a video work built from sound that deconstructed and reconstructed the words of Hojoki. In the video production method, using a technique Yamamoto often employs, he creates a system (equation) that randomly offsets the timing of the segmented characters, substitutes the cell materials into it, and, inspired by the unexpected and accidental patterns that emerge, feeds them back in again and edits them frame by frame to give them a time axis. This time, in the musical process as well, in addition to instruments such as the piano, an attempt was made to record footage of Kinoshita reciting Hojoki, deconstruct it, and use it as audio source material. With Kinoshita’s concepts of emptiness and dependent origination in her calligraphic practice, Corey Fuller’s richly quiet ambient textures, and Shinichi Yamamoto’s meta perspective when viewing landscapes in his works, each artist’s worldview is brought together in collaboration, with Hojoki as the point of intersection. The central theme is the “universal” that is felt even while always observing the “ever-changing.” After being presented on four outdoor screens in Shinjuku as part of the Shinjuku Creators Festa, the project has continued to evolve as an ongoing collaboration, including the development of an immersive installation version at Haneda Airport as part of the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ “Media Art × Cultural Resources: Distributed Museum” initiative.