Thinking About the Meaning of Things Through Making Things

I've been interested in media art since junior high school, and in high school, I taught myself how to write programs. However, I wasn't thinking of making media art my research theme in college. I think the first thing that started to change my mind was taking the entrance exam for SFC. I remember being surprised by SFC's approach of evaluating not just knowledge but also my own opinions when I wrote an essay for the entrance exam, and I felt that it was a good fit for me to pursue my interests in my own way. The second catalyst was when I joined a student club called "Art & Technology" right after enrolling and felt that the senior students didn't see creating art and conducting research as separate things. I realized, "It's okay to make research out of creating things."

After that, I also joined the Akira Wakita Lab and the Shinya Fujii Lab. As I thought about what attracted me to media art, I realized that my interest was not in the high level of technology or beauty, but in the essential nature of media as a medium—a means of communication. Since then, I have been creating works that focus on the media itself and contemplate its meaning.

At the "Open Research Forum 2019," an event to showcase research results from SFC, I exhibited a work titled "Clear Up of the Universe," which I co-created with a younger student who had studied astrophysics in high school. It is a visualization and sonification of data from a temperature distribution map of the universe right after its birth—the oldest observable data using electromagnetic waves. By projecting this data onto a hemisphere, you can see the minute temperature distribution in three dimensions while also hearing it as sound. I thought that sound was the most delicate and suitable medium for conveying the faint fluctuations in temperature. Astrophysics is generally unfamiliar to most people, but I created this work with the idea that by turning it into an art piece in this way, people could reflect on the birth of the universe, which is connected to our own existence.

I believe it's not enough to just move your hands or just use your head; it's important to do both creating and thinking at the same time. SFC has that culture, so I think I can engage in research with people from various fields, with creation and discussion working together like two wheels of a cart.

For my extracurricular activities, I develop and sell analog synthesizer kits as part of "Qux," a creative unit I formed with two senior students who also love sound. As I continued my creative work, I realized that unlike software, which is financially easy to produce and distribute, hardware requires more resources like money and materials to continue making.

Therefore, to get our activities known, we started selling the synthesizers we developed, as well as running crowdfunding campaigns and holding workshops. We continue our activities while thinking about how to keep making things, including how to raise funds and how to maintain our motivation.

I believe that making things enriches one's sensibilities. These days, the everyday tools we use casually, like smartphones, are becoming more and more complex inside, and there's an increasing number of things whose mechanisms—how they work, how electricity flows through them—we don't really understand. But I feel that if we just go with the flow and give up on understanding, our perspective becomes narrower.

Through making things, you start to understand a little, and that feeling of "getting it" is enjoyable. And I feel that by "getting it," your view of the world expands a little. I want to pursue that kind of small "I get it" experience for myself, and I also want the people who see my work to experience it.

I am also in charge of stage lighting for SFC's "Musical Circle EM." The visual and auditory information that constitutes the performing arts has existed since primitive times. By comparing my hands-on experience in stage production with the perspectives from my current research, I believe I can interpret the characteristics and appeal of the performing arts in my own way.

Someday, I hope to create a stage performance that reinvents the existing framework.