Kenji Kojima / Bitwise Splitting and Merging of Pixels / Begins with Chaos - Lascaux
The artist Kenji Kojima believes that the world around him is full of chaotic information. The sensory organs construct the world by extracting only certain components from the chaos, such as visual and auditory information, like a filter. Thus, we construct our world with the "key" of the sensory organs, as if we were deciphering a code. This project for art is constructed with scientific methods, but not with practical science. Currently, all media is recorded in binary form. The project uses a cryptographic technique called a one-time pad to encrypt color information by performing a bitwise XOR operation with random numbers on all the original image data. In other words, it can be separated into two pieces of data: the key to breaking the code and the code. This project was inspired by the French Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat. Seurat showed how the human eye creates color by mixing elements of color. Each color contains red, green, and blue information. The chaotic mosaic of colors is decoded using random numbers that match the key and become the original image. The artist Kojima believes that the visual information obtained from the chaos is mixed with auditory information. This video can be shared freely. The greatest feature of digital art is that it allows unlimited reproduction of real works of art. If a real work of art could be copied indefinitely, its monetary value would disappear. He is trying to eliminate the abnormal financial situation of art, which is embedded in capitalism, and give it a different meaning. If art had meaning even after its monetary value disappeared, it would revive the connection with the viewer. Online exhibition: https://kenjikojima.com/Lascaux/ The Lascaux image is under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.
Kenji Kojima was born in Japan and moved to New York City in 1980. He spent his first 10 years in New York City painting in egg tempera. Citibank, Hess Oil, and others collected his paintings. The personal computer improved rapidly in the 1980s. He felt more comfortable doing computer art than painting. He converted his artwork to digital in the early 1990s. His early digital works were archived at the New Museum - Rhizome, New York. In 2007, he developed the computer software "RGB MusicLab" and created an interdisciplinary work exploring the relationship between images and music. In 2014 he programmed the software "Luce" for the "Techno Synesthesia" project. His digital art series has been exhibited in New York, at media art festivals worldwide, including Europe, Brazil, and Asia, and in online exhibitions. https://kenjikojima.com/Lascaux/