I was born and raised in Tokyo. In “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter,” I express the changing seasons by combining AI and generative art, focusing on flowers that are familiar in everyday life, under the theme of flowers in the city and flowers in memory. The reason I chose flowers as a motif is that I felt there is a commonality between flowers and digital signage, which is the exhibition format of “Poems in Code — The Present of Generative Art / Moving Images Generated by Programming.” When you go to the center of Tokyo, there are eye-catching signs everywhere, and even waiting for a traffic light can feel like it passes very quickly. In daily life, when walking outside, it becomes a habit to focus on “getting to one’s destination,” and we end up forgetting to walk while noticing the changing seasons. Flowers that color the seasons are very colorful and beautiful, much like the signage in the city. However, I think we rarely take the time to observe those flowers closely or stop to look up their names. Likewise, we also do not often stop and carefully look at what is written on or displayed by signage. In this sense, I felt that flowers in the city and digital signage have something in common. All of the 3D flowers in the work are created by first generating 2D images with generative AI, then measuring their depth using AI functions and converting them into three-dimensional forms. The images are generated to resemble real flowers as closely as possible. Generative AI is good at capturing the characteristics of what it creates, but it is not perfect. By comparing them with real flowers, observing the differences, and recognizing flowers anew, I chose realistic images in the hope that they could link with the viewer’s memory and sensations. In addition, the AI-generated videos in the work use images of seasonal flowers created with generative AI. By re-outputting them as video, the shapes and colors of the flowers harmonize and begin to look like new flowers, becoming nameless flowers. I felt this process was close to how flowers are recognized in memory, so I incorporated this expression. Flowers in the city may exist in our memories as something vague and blurry, like AI-generated video. I created “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter” with the hope that even in busy times, there can be moments to stop and enjoy the present.

From singer-songwriter RIQUO’s album “TWIN PIANOS,” a short animation set to the song “The Meaning Of Love.” A singer sings of the meaning of love amid sounds that echo and travel through water. “How many springs have passed since we first met? And there are things known only to the two of us And now I am by your side That feeling I have when I’m singing I know it—this love is true” (excerpt from the lyrics) Like improvising within a jazz piece, this is a visual poem drawn from imagination, valuing feeling over meaning.

When I looked at Jomon pottery with the naked eye, its distinctive protrusions and patterns made me imagine landscapes, natural phenomena, the forms and movements of living creatures, and even sounds and sensations. The way fragments of various kinds of information intermingle in it feels almost like a poem of the Jomon people. Could these not be related to life forms that the Jomon people ate in order to survive—that is, might they have felt prayer and awe toward the living beings they were given, and might that energy have given rise to the grotesque yet beautiful forms of Jomon pottery? This work was conceived and created based on these ideas.