15.Ikki Kita Exhibition
Ikki Kita × Naohiro Ukawa Generative AI Directed by UKAWA NAOHIRO with REALROCKDESIGN（Japan）
Ikki Kita was a native of Ryōtsu Port, Sado City and a pre-war Japanese thinker, social activist, and national socialist. As the ideological leader of the young Kōdō-ha ""Imperial Way"" officers in the February 26 Incident, he was arrested and sentenced to death by a military tribunal. In 1905, Ikki Kita published a lengthy homage to radical revolution titled “To the Sado Middle Schoolers” in the Sado Newspaper. Kita had entered Sado Middle School in 1897 but withdrew in 1900 due to an eye disease. This manifesto, written when Kita was 23, was directed at his younger peers. At the request of the Sado Island Galaxy Art Festival, I animated this long poem using generative AI!!! I digested Kita’s intense poem through my own interpretation, reading it aloud with my own voice through a vocoder, which I then transformed into a prompt. I deliberately removed inflection through the vocoder because I felt that “performing” the revolutionist’s fiery poetry would distance me from his ideas. The act of “performing” that fervor felt like a desecration of Kita’s spirit.
""Prompt engineering is a drama. It is the stage direction for directing large language models."" This realization came to me when I used generative AI to submit cover art for The Underground Theater Vol. 7 by Masahiko Akuta. In this animation project, I felt that the ""text-to-image"" generation process effectively conveyed the essence of Kita's poetry. Prompting the AI with Kita’s words and generating images from them became an act of agitation itself!!!!!!! This piece is a generative revolution, wherein the physical body of the present era absorbs the revolutionary cries of a Meiji-era social activist, and through AI, visualizes a poetic realm in which agitation flourishes!!!!!!
Art Details
- Art Number：15
- Year of Production：2024
- Exhibition Period：August 11 (Sun) , 2024 - November 10 (Sun) Closed on Tuesdays and Wednesday (excludes national holidays)
- Admission Fee：Without Exhibition Pass - Individual ticket: ¥1,000
Venue & Access
- Location：Ikki Kita's birthplace
- Opening Hours：August-September: 10:00-17:00,October-November: 10:00-16:00
- Closed：Closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays
- Parking：Ondeko Dome parking lot →View the location of the parking lot
Ikki Kita × Naohiro Ukawa
Contemporary ‘Presence’ Artist | Founder of DOMMUNE
Born in 1968, Naohiro Ukawa is a Contemporary ‘Presence’ Artist engaged in a wide array of activities since the late 1980s, including video creation, graphic design, VJing, writing, and teaching. His work blurs the lines between fine art and popular culture, making him one of Japan’s most expressive and unbound artists. Gaining prominence as a graphic designer and video artist in the late 1980s, Ukawa has since participated in numerous exhibitions in Japan and abroad, including Buzz Club: News from Japan (MoMA PS1, New York, 2001) and JAM: Tokyo-London (Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2001). In 2010, Ukawa launched Japan’s first live-streaming studio and channel, DOMMUNE, which gained worldwide attention for its record-breaking viewership. The same year, DOMMUNE was nominated for work at the Japan Media Arts Festival. For Ukawa, the daily acts of filming, streaming, and archiving programs at the DOMMUNE studio are considered part of his contemporary presence art practice.
In 2016, he opened a 500-meter-wide satellite studio “DOMMUNE LINZ!” in the Train Hall at Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), and in 2019, he established “DOMMUNE SETOUCHI” during the Setouchi Triennale, both of which generated significant buzz. DOMMUNE has participated in various international contemporary art exhibitions, establishing satellite studios worldwide in cities such as London, Dortmund, Stockholm, Paris, Mumbai, Linz, Fukushima, Yamaguchi, Osaka, Kagawa, Kanazawa, Akita, Sapporo, and Sado Island. He continually explores the dual concepts of ubiquity—being 'here and now' and being 'anywhere and everywhere.' Throughout its 14-year history, DOMMUNE has broadcast approximately 7,000 programs, totaling over 15,000 hours and 200 terabytes, with over 200 million total viewers. In 2019, DOMMUNE relocated to the 9th floor of the newly renovated Shibuya PARCO. In 2020, marking its 10th anniversary, DOMMUNE entered its second chapter, evolving into its new form, SUPER DOMMUNE, with an eye on future technologies post-Web 3.0. In 2023, Ukawa's solo exhibition Naohiro Ukawa: FINAL MEDIA THERAPIST @DOMMUNE at the Nerima Art Museum explored the role of the artist in the age of generative AI, questioning where the artist resides in the creation process. His use of custom-tuned AI and robotic arms to produce spatial paintings, exploring new ways of ""drawing,"" made headlines. In 2021, Ukawa received the 71st Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts.