In this article, artist Kazuhiro Tanimoto speaks with Jordan Kantor about his upcoming Art Blocks Curated project Memories of Digital Data. They discuss the artist’s earliest experiments with coding, the way in which his engineering work in materials research informs his artistic practice, and how the Memories of Digital Data expands upon his previous releases on Art Blocks: Wabi Sabi and GHOST IN THE CODE.

‍Kazuhiro Tanimoto is a generative artist and materials research and development chemist living in Japan. He holds a Master of Engineering from Tokyo Metropolitan University and a Ph.D. in engineering from Kansai University. He has been developing dyes, functional molecules, and environmentally friendly plastics. Aside from his engineering work, Kazuhiro has been creating digital art since the 1990s, and he regards scientific research and art-making as intimately related activities. In addition to his generative work published digitally, Kazuhiro has shown his works at events in Japan, including, at the Japan Media Arts Festival, as well as in other contexts internationally.

Jordan Kantor: Hi, Kazuhiro. Great to speak with you. It is really nice to welcome you back to Art Blocks for your third project, Memories of Digital Data. This Curated project follows Wabi Sabi and GHOST IN THE CODE, both released last year. Before we get into the Memories, can you tell us a bit about how you first got into making art?

Kazuhiro Tanimoto: Hello, Jordan-san. I am truly honored to be speaking with you and to release Memories of Digital Data as an Art Blocks Curated project.

Ever since I can remember, I have loved to make things. However, I was not good at drawing, but rather I liked crafts, where I used materials to assemble something. An event that had a great impact on my life was when I was ten years old, (about thirty years ago), I was shown a Macintosh LC 520 that my uncle was using for work. He had quit his corporate job and gone back to his hometown to start a translation business, and had this computer. I feel nostalgia now, but the icons scattered across the screen and the magic box of multiple applications that could be combined to do all sorts of things made my heart leap with excitement as I saw the future. Ever since then, I have been hooked on computers. During the summer school vacations, I would take the bullet train to my grandparents' house and play lots of games on the Mac with my uncle.

Later, when my parents bought me a Macintosh Performa 575, and I got tired of playing games, I started creating custom icons. At that time, I believe, Mac OS icons were 32x32 pixels with 256 colors. I submitted those works to the editorial departments of computer magazines, and, if they were accepted, they were included in the accompanying CD-ROM, or I posted them to the PC communication community, which was mainstream before the Internet became popular, and played with them.

My first exposure to programming in a formal sense was LOGO, which I encountered in elementary school. Although I did not fully understand the code I typed, I enjoyed modifying parts of it to change its look and movement. Later, I learned about the C language using THINK C (a development environment that was mainstream on Macs at the time) that my uncle bought for me and some Inside Macintosh books that I bought with my own pocket money. Over several years of long gaps and short learning periods, I created small puzzle games, useless goofball apps like a caterpillar crawling around on the desktop, and extensions that showed how much free memory was on the hard drive. It was also around the time when the Internet was emerging, so I set up my own website on GeoCities and published my software. I remember how happy I was when other people downloaded my software and responded.

JK: Like many artists working in this space, it sounds like early access to technology, do-it-yourself tinkering, and excitement about the future were all important factors in your foundational creative development. Can you talk a bit about how this developed towards a mature practice: how did you first get into digital or generative art?

KT: Ever since I was a child, I have loved shiny, sparkling things. I collected glass, natural stones, and plastic and kept them in a drawer for safekeeping. So when I got my Mac and started creating icons and software, I always wanted to create something beautiful to look at.  On the other hand, I also loved chemistry and experimentation. I was fascinated by the behavior of atoms and molecules that were invisible to the eye, using household items to generate and burn hydrogen and grow beautiful crystals of copper sulfate.

When I was in high school, I had a lot of concerns about my career path. And in college, I had to choose between design, information engineering, and chemistry. I ended up enrolling in the chemistry department and becoming a researcher, which had been one of my dreams.

While immersed in making new materials as a researcher, my creative desire did not disappear, and I continued to develop smartphone apps and do artwork with electronics. The artwork I worked on was Light-bending material. This is not generative work, but an installation in which I developed a transparent solid material that changes light in curves, and combined it with laser beams. An Arduino was used to program a motor to control the output and direction of the laser, and I was proud that this work was selected to be shown at the Japan Media Arts Festival.

After this project, I was working on further installations using scientific phenomena and digital works using Arduino and Processing, and became interested in generative art. Around this time, in 2018, I started making small works and posting them online.

JK: I think we can see the through lines of your artistic interests already in these early works and experiments. Tell us, please, how did you discover the blockchain as a medium for art?

KT: I became aware of the existence of blockchain and NFTs fairly late, in 2021. I was very excited to see programmatic artworks being released and appreciated independently of the existing art industry. Moreover, the moment I understood how Art Blocks worked—among other things, that the code stored on-chain drew art—it was as if something I had been searching for for a long time suddenly appeared. I was thrilled by the fact that artworks were not created with image or video editing software, but only with program code, and that this code was stored on the blockchain.

I started working on GHOST IN THE CODE in October 2021, and released it as my first Art Blocks piece nine months later. This was a big step for me personally.

JK: So it has been a couple of years now since you have made generative work with the blockchain specifically in mind as the destination. Can you talk about how your creative process has evolved in this period? How does Memories of Digital Data build on Wabi Sabi and GHOST IN THE CODE?

KT: What I have been conscious of in common with my past Art Blocks works is concept and novelty. Before starting to create a work, I take a considerable amount of time to think about what I want to say or express with that work. I also want the work to have some novelty or innovation to it, which is very difficult to do, given how many people are working with the blockchain in generative ways now. It is like a Cambrian explosion in the history of biological evolution! It’s almost like everything has already been done. Still, I try to create my own artwork, hoping to somehow incorporate new concepts and ideas of expression into my work and create something, however small, that will remain in the minds of those who see my work.

While there is much generative art I love that is static, I have been focused on creating works that move. I understand that many people prefer static art that can be printed out and hung on the wall in its full form. But I am most interested in pursuing the animated aspect of on-chain generative art. I mean this in distinction to those NFTs which are animated with video data in IPFS. In that case, playback time is limited due to file size limitations. With a code base, by contrast, we can continue to express unlimited time and unlimited movement with the amount of space available for on-chain storage.

But to keep the work moving, the speed of code execution is a bottleneck, and I enjoy trying to find coding solutions within this limitation. GHOST IN THE CODE started out as a storyboard show with facial expressions that just switched, but I decided to draw the process of facial expression change to make it look more alive. This required a lot of work with Shader, and that feature alone took several months. Memories of Digital Data builds on what I learned developing this drawing system.

Sound is also an important element of Memories of Digital Data. The use of code to express sound was also a challenge in Wabi Sabi. Wabi Sabi was inspired by Japanese calligraphy, and, in an early version, I coded the sound of the brush hitting the paper and the brush rubbing against the paper to express a sense of greater dynamism. While I eventually left the audio component out of that project, I continued to work on generating a variety of sounds, and eventually was able to integrate them here in Memories of Digital Data, as representing the waves.

JK: It is really interesting to hear how one project builds on innovations you make in the previous one. There is a coherent story of development across your on chain projects, and we can see each informing the other. What about outside of this context: how does your art practice connect to and depart from the work you do as a scientist?

KT: I think that the work of a scientist is almost the same in some aspects as that of an artist. The scientist builds a foundation by studying existing theories, and then combines his or her ideas and inspirations to materialize something new. In chemistry, the object of creation can be a molecule or a molded product, for example. This creative process involves a variety of thoughtful explorations inside and outside of ourselves. When creating generative art, I experience a similar process, and go through months of trial and error. Sometimes I feel stuck because I am not satisfied with how much code I have written, and other times I suddenly feel like I have jumped the gun on something. This happens equally when I am working on a material in a scientific context—encountering unexpected beauty, or the joy of understanding principles that you could not control and creating what you desire. I continue to fail for months or years in order to feel the excitement of that moment.

JK: There is a lot to be said for the spirit of experimentation and discovery that animates both disciplines, and, actually a lot of interesting scholarly work has been connecting the idea of the studio as a laboratory and how these pursuits share methods around knowledge production. (I am thinking in particular about Picturing Science Producing Art, an important anthology edited by Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison in the late 1990s). It is really interesting to hear such connections drawn from your own firsthand experience. So, let’s switch gears. Please tell us a bit about Memories of Digital Data?

KT: This is a work expressing a collapsed world through sound and visuals in code. My doubts about the permanence of digital data and nostalgia for bygone days are at its root.

In my lifetime, the storage of digital data started with 3.5-inch floppy disks and migrated to Zip, CD-R, the Internet, and, now, cloud servers. Before the Internet, software stored on multiple floppies in the software section of computer stores and CD-ROMs that came with computer magazines were the primary means to obtain new data. I also carefully saved icon data and code fragments that I had created myself on floppies and kept a large number of them. However, most of the data that I treasured is no longer accessible. This is due to deterioration, crashes of the recording media, server closures, or the fact that even if the data is there, there is no hardware or software left to play it back. So I wanted to ask: is the blockchain as persistent as its apologists believe? I think it will persist if various conditions continue to be met. But that is not a foregone conclusion. Someday, decades from now, this work that is supposed to be on-chain may disappear, or the code may be there, but in some unplayable form. Of course, it may persist as is. But no one can predict that with certainty. We must accept that. No matter how much science and technology advances, there are no absolutes.

In terms of novelty, I worked on making environmental sound coordinate with the visuals. The sound of the waves matches the collapsed world so well that it feels like a mixture of the real and the unreal. I built the visuals second, based on the sound of the waves.

I drew the first sketches of this project at the beginning of October 2022, and spent the next four months or so refining it. Looking back at this work a few months after its completion, I can get emotional. While I was working on this piece, I was reminiscing about my memories of my uncle, and the days I missed him. Digital data is also a fragile memory.

JK: It is quite powerful how your personal memories and motivation can get folded into a more generalized metaphor about the fragility of digital data and ideas of permanence and disappearance. There is a lot to think about in that, for sure. Can you give us a sense of what we might expect and look for in the series as it is revealed?

KT: There are ten different compositions in this work. In addition, the colors are automatically generated without using a color palette. The combination of these compositions will give you a variety of looks. I hope you will explore what the code can do in the “Explore Possibilities” feature on the project page before its release.

JK: It has been fun to experiment with that and see what the algorithm can do. Is there anything else you’d like to share that would help viewers approach and appreciate your work?

KT: I would like you to view this work with the room darkened and the display set to full screen or projected on a projector. Then, I hope you will turn on the sound and take the time to experience the interaction of the visuals and sounds. It is not bad to cut out a still image and print it, but I consider this work as a digitally native animated piece. If I can move the viewer's heart even a little with this work, I will be most pleased.

JK: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, Kazuhiro. It has been a treat to see this project develop and we are really looking forward to the release. In the meantime, what is the best way for people to learn more about you and to follow your work?

KT: I have my own website. I also post information on Twitter.  Last but not least, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all Art Blocks members for their kindness. I find the art on Art Blocks truly brilliant and am glad to be part of this community.