Video Bulb: Simply plug this lipstick size device directly into the video input jack on your TV and it will play endless black and white pixel animation of Bitman on your TV screen. The animation is made using Bit-hike which is developed by the artist himself. Bit-hike is an animation tool to create 8 x 8 dot pattern and is open to the public through a website that has both an animation editor and the archive (www.vector-scan.com/index.html). Video Bulb is made commercially available, distributed by Yoshimoto Kogyo.
Nicodama: Affix a pair of Nicodama, and a face appears. I remember an experience from my early childhood; my mother once decorated the top of my lunch she packed in a lunchbox, to make it look like a face. I could not eat it. A face is a shape, of which we have a particular perception. Even a manmade object can look like a face depending on the arrangement of certain patterns. Once something starts to look like a face, one develops certain feelings towards it. If objects around us that we don’t usually pay much attention to suddenly started growing faces, what would they try to tell us?
Nicodama is an ‘eyeball’ equipped with an infrared transceiver and a magnetic mechanism. When you put two Nicodamas on an object which you would like to turn into a face, they start communicating with each other to make a pair. Then they start blinking together at random intervals. No external condition influences the blinking behavior; the aspect you will find on the ‘face’ solely depends on the object you have chosen.
The idea of this project is to draw attention to our surroundings by empathizing with ordinary objects around us. Ideally, Nicodama should be applied to objects with personal contexts such as one’s own belongings or familiar objects in one’s room or neighborhood. The idea is derived from Japanese traditional thinking. People felt each of the objects around them had a spirit, and treated them with respect and care. Today we share a more objective and scientific approach in seeing things. While there is no doubt that it is important to maintain this attitude, the capacity for empathy is equally important. These two attitudes complement each other. I believe my project will help in an understanding of this.
