At the foot of Mount Nyotai, a spring wells up in a peering dry well, and Jizō returns with a frog. In the galaxy’s homeland, a masquerade in a brimful spring (lotion). A kaleidoscope peeks, and inside is Jizō. The frog is blessed and reborn as undergarments, transcending dimensions. This video was created to commemorate the collaboration between TENGA and Saigo no Shudan. As the fifth installment of “TXA-TENGA by Artist-,” a project in which TENGA Co., Ltd. creates apparel, goods, and other products together with artists, four collaborative items were released with Saigo no Shudan.

Hidden, untouched landscapes and the four seasons of Nasu Town are captured, and the diverse culture and history condensed there are crafted through technical editing from an enormous amount of footage that hardly seems possible for a single town.

In the initial concept, we truly entrusted part of the production to AI, exploring a singularity-like structure: what does it mean for AI to possess a self and express itself? However, while AI is suited to producing “something similar” as a form of collective intelligence, when it comes to depicting “the beauty within unease” or “human-like misalignment,” human hands were inevitably necessary. As a result, we shifted to a design in which AI expressions are “intentionally reconstructed by humans,” arriving at a paradoxical approach in which humans manually create the very condition of AI’s “imperfection.” We have designed it as a game, in a sense: a contrastive device that highlights human creativity by having humans deliberately create something AI-like.

I directed the brand movie for TOCCA’s 30th anniversary.