Fragmentations of Unity

So Kanno × Takuro Yonezawa × Yutaro Kyono

Artwork Description:

Fragmentations of Unity is a swarm robotic light installation — an inquiry into what it means to be social, and to be one. Twenty-five suspended tubes hover overhead, each a translucent plastic shell over a rotational mechanism, RGB LEDs and thermal sensors. Each is minimal. Each is oriented: a defined front and back, a vector and a will. We treat being-oriented as a primitive of trans-species communication, a stripped-down ancestor of the attention that living things give to one another. The tubes sense and respond — turning toward whoever moves closest, breathing in unison, drifting apart, shifting tempo and colour. The encounter unfolds at the scale of the body: to enter is to be noticed; to move is to be answered. The work is not viewed but entered. Six real-time choreographies, each with its own algorithm and 4-channel sound, give the work a vocabulary: Heaven and Earth — one against the many; Fireflies — synchrony and asynchrony; The Two of Us — the beginning of dialogue; Facing — searching for heat; Fish — a drifting crowd; Rotating Ceiling — faces of the sky. A microcosm of attention and recognition, lived from inside.

Project Collaborators:

Project by So Kanno, Takuro Yonezawa and Yutaro Kyono Hardware & Software by Yutaro Kyono, Hiroshi Hirano, Shohei Suzuki Robot choreography by So Kanno Sound design by So Kanno, Takuro Yonezawa Thermal presence detection system by Naoto Ichikawa, Kazuma Kano, Akio Sakakibara Electrical setup by Chikashi Kato, Yurika Uematsu Cinematography by Kaiya Shimura With Nodira Tillayeva and Yuriko Yoshioka Support by Akio Sakakibara, Madoka Okoshi, Yoshiki Watanabe, Kaiya Shimura, Shotaro Kamijo Commissioned by Common Nexus, Tokai National Higher Education and Research System This research is supported by JST CREST (JPMJCR22M4) and the GAP Fund Program (Step 1) on Tongali Platform.