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like that. Its bleeding, cracked, feathering lines of ink brush draw the movement of the
heart. It makes us feel the color even if it is monochrome.
I had an inspiration to compute the Sansui picture typically by Sesshu and the
world of Zen which was expressed in Sansui picture. Zen makes us feel Japanese
culture by its absence of absolutes, beauty sense of “Wabi-Sabi”, and getting rid of
the water from the Chinese garden with taking the Asian culture in. Many elements in
Japanese culture are gathered in Sansui, like the Ume-Sansui (Sansui with Japanese
aprlicot). I wanted to express the Sansui picture and Zen culture, centering the
Japanese Zen.
Cultures consist of 'the God, the Buddhist image, a view of Life, a view of world'.
They have been created, changed, opposed and fused with each other, and are
irrational and rational. They, which have both irrationality and rationality, have
seemed difficult to handle.
Almost all the existent media art works featured traditional contents like Noh and
Kabuki, and added interactive function to them. These were seemed as only
superficial digital expressions, though these are extensions of texts, images, videos,
and their combinational multimedia that explain the traditional culture. They are only
a explanations and not new arts. They are on the stage only to treat the surface, than to
approach directly to the culture.
There was no research to make use of the hierarchy of Japanese culture to the
computer logic in the existent computer technology. This is the reason why there are
no arts expressing the deep historical 'culture' in large scale yet. Another reason is
that everyone have paid attention to the uniqueness of Japanese culture and seemed
the Japanese culture as Japanese superficial expressions.
On the other hand, technologies finds the mechanism of phenomena, and analyzes
the elements of them with the structure. And the study finds new relationship between
different things and constructs them, by reconstructing them, trying some
combination of them and comparing them.
What we can make use of in creating new media arts are extracting the basic
structure or thoughts of Japanese culture, modeling them or using them as tools with
using the technology. Fresh media works or art works would likely be created by that.
This method will bring about a great possibility to the advancement in media arts and
interactive arts hereafter.
Thanks to the cooperation of Seigo Matsuoka, who is a researcher of Japanese
Culture in Editorial Engineering Laboratory, we took a little advantage in this difficult
challenge that we reconstruct the world of Zen which was expressed in Sansui picture
on the computer. Though we needed three years, we reached to the unique system
named
《
ZENetic Computer
》
as the result.
We succeeded to construct the extremely futuristic interactive system by projecting
a part of allegory or symbol in Sansui pictures, Yamato-e (Japanese traditional
paintings), Haikus, Kimonos that reminds of the Japanese culture - the structure of
the oriental thought, the structure of Buddhist philosophy and the mechanism of
Japanese traditional culture - which rarely have featured by the computers before.
This system uses various symbols and allegories that are included in Buddhism, an
oriental thought and the Japanese culture. This is because they include a plenty of
implications, and they have extraordinary terms, figures or colors. There are many
rules in Sansui pictures and the world of Zen. We discovered that computers can
