(日本語) TOKYO FRAGMENTS

(日本語) I was born and raised in Tokyo. For me, Tokyo is not so much a special place as it is part of everyday life itself. Although it is a major metropolis, once you move away from central areas such as Shinjuku and Shibuya, you can still find fields, greenery, old shrines, and many other familiar landscapes. In this work, I have collected fragments of Tokyo, focusing on places that are personally meaningful to me, including neighborhoods where I often walk and areas where I have lived in the past.

The landscapes are based on photographs taken with my iPhone, which I developed into images and moving images through image analysis by ChatGPT and prompts generated from that analysis. For me, this process is not simply a way of reproducing real landscapes, but also a means of reconsidering familiar places from a different perspective.

When I come across fruit growing on a tree or flowers blooming by the roadside while taking a walk, I sometimes feel a sudden, small sense of joy. I incorporated these subtle moments of excitement—the feeling of discovering something unexpectedly beautiful in everyday life—as motifs of transparent glass creatures and plants. By introducing slight changes into real landscapes, I hope to create an opportunity for viewers to look again at things they might normally overlook.

In addition to unnatural text and expressions resulting from AI hallucinations, this work also actively incorporates moving images generated using not only the latest models but also older ones. I have been creating works with AI as a collaborator since 2022. In recent years, AI-generated images and moving images have become remarkably smoother and more realistic. Yet I am more drawn to the expressions produced by AI’s mistakes and imperfections, in which I sense something resembling the uneven flow of time through which human beings live. I believe these qualities contain a sense of chance and a distinct kind of fascination that differs from completely controlled forms of expression.

In this work, the real Tokyo and slight fantasies generated by AI quietly intersect. Rather than depicting a grand narrative or the Tokyo that everyone knows, I have focused on the small fragments of Tokyo that I have lived in, walked through, and discovered. I hope these fragments may remind viewers of their own familiar surroundings and of the small discoveries hidden within everyday life.

Director

(日本語) SAEKO EHARA

Country

(日本語) Japan

Year

(日本語) 2026