Kenji Kojima 

Art Talk Podcast: Kenji Kojima's The Experiment of the Period of Great Change. 

17:40 

The artist Kenji Kojima explores the intersection of perception, digital data, and media through works like RGB MusicLab, which converts images into sound, and encryption-based projects using one-time pad principles. His art often involves encoding images into unreadable mosaics using XOR operations, which can only be reversed with the correct key. Kojima sees this process as a metaphor for human perception, which extracts meaning from chaos through the senses. He expresses skepticism towards NFT art and places a stronger emphasis on replicability over the ownership of digital art. Throughout his career, Kojima has been influenced by the idea of developing freeware, which has shaped his belief that media art should be a guide to the future rather than being solely focused on ownership.

This podcast features an AI-driven discussion about four recent digital initiatives developed by artist Kenji Kojima. Silent videos from these projects are projected in the background during the conversation. The projects are digital interpretations of "Lascaux prehistoric cave paintings", "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat, "Mona Lisa" by Leonardo da Vinci, and the Arles paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, generated using binary data and algorithms. Today, the earliest cave paintings and the pixels on our screens are all guided by binary algorithms. The original projects consist of video and audio content, but this video only includes podcast audio. Technically, the AI loads only project site descriptions and others from each project website, analyzes them, edits them, and creates interactive podcast audio. Artist Kojima added the background during the video editing process. This podcast was developed to enhance comprehension of the context and future of the digital world through artist Kojima's digital creations. Project Web: https://kenjikojima.com/AI-ArtTalk/ 

Kenji Kojima was born in Japan. He moved to New York in 1980 and began his artistic career. For the first 10 years, he painted contemporary egg tempera paintings using medieval art materials and techniques. He was strongly attracted to contemporary art but felt stuck in the future of modern civilization and art with excessive material value. He tried to experience the history of the creation of the European concept of art through actual materials and techniques, that is, the history of art that is not written in literature. He noticed that as society developed, people's minds expanded, materials and tools advanced, and the visual arts changed.

The personal computer improved rapidly during the 1980s. He felt more comfortable with computer art than paintings. He studied computer programming himself. In 2007, he developed the computer software "RGB MusicLab" and created an interdisciplinary artwork that explores the relationship between images and music. But soon ran into a big problem. The software would not run on the new operating systems. He shot the artwork to video while the software ran on the operating system. His digital art series has been shown at media art festivals worldwide.

After COVID-19, he could not go out to shoot a video, but he found numerous archival artworks online. He launched a new series titled "The Musical Interpretation of Paintings". Kojima believes that the sensory organs construct the world by extracting only certain components from the chaos, such as visual and auditory information, like a filter. So we create our world with the "key" of the sensory organs as if we were deciphering a code. In 2023, "Bitwise Splitting and Merging of Pixels" began with the self-question, "With the development of generative AI, can we create visual art that is not an assemblage of past visual data? Currently, all media is recorded in binary form. This fact leads to the manipulation of color pixels using bitwise operations. 

https://kenjikojima.com/