Yasushi Noguchi, Yuta Ogai: Diverse and Universal Camera

Artist(s):

Title:

Diverse and Universal Camera

Exhibition:

SIGGRAPH Asia 2024: Art Gallery: Neither Utopia Nor Dystopia

Medium:

Video Installation

Artist Statement:

This work is a video installation that searches and collages the footage from the Encyclopedia Cinematographica (EC) using approximately 50 different behavior style related keywords (tags) such as dancing, laughing, and spinning and then plays the results in a loop. Since the combination of videos changes every time, it al- lows us to observe the differences and connections between various videos from different eras and regions. This is a work that reinter- prets the characteristics of EC as an encyclopedia and visualizes them. It is intended to be a medium that enables both chance en- counters, like traditional paper encyclopedias, and the expansion of knowledge based on relevance, as seen in modern internet searches. In the 2019 exhibition, all video tagging was done manually, but this time, we are attempting to apply deep learning technology by artificial intelligence (AI) to the work, creating a hybrid system that combines AI-based automatic tagging with manual tagging. In this exhibition, we are also simultaneously releasing a database containing information on all EC titles. In today’s world, character- ized by events like the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Palestine issue, nationalistic tendencies in various countries, and anti-immigration sentiment, there is a prevailing atmosphere of intolerance world- wide. It is precisely in such times that we believe it is important to reconsider the social significance of EC, which has documented the diversity and universality of behaviors in the natural world.