This is some very interesting art from Aya Kato. Click on the “Gallery” link at the top to check out 8 years of illustrations.

The mood ranges from dark and gothy to bright and elegant; always with very fine details and a distinct, personal style. Each of the images has a name and story associated with it as well. Many are drawn from mythology and legend and feel extremely well suited to Aya’s artistic methods.

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“Pika Pika” is a Japanese onomatopoeia with a meaning akin to that of our twinkle, sparkle, or glitter. It has come to be used as a term for a memetic movement of “light doodles” which are spreading around the internet. These are created by using a flashlight or led lightsource to draw images in the air, the trails of which become a single image in long-exposure photographs, and then turning a sequence of these images into an animation.

The Pikapika project started by Tochka, a Japanese creative group, has now collaborated with the Japanese internet company So-Net to create the light-doodle-animation extravaganza that is “PiKA PiKA the Movie”.

The project’s blog on So-Net has quite a few different pikapika videos, including some behind the scenes footage. It’s interesting to see how the seemingly random flashlight wavings of a bunch of people wandering around turns into complex and charming collaborative animations.

We’re big fans of multimedia artist Takagi Masakatsu here at Red Ruin. He recently performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. as part of the Japan! Culture + Hyperculture festival. For those of us who couldn’t make it, the entire performance can be seen online here.

And for those of you in D.C. *wink* I sure hope you went out to see this.

Nicely synchronized ferrofluid manipulation and music. A soothing liquid world of gently bedaggered monoliths.

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Inviting photography from Sho Uchida with moments of intense stillness.

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It’s hard to imagine the amount of work that went into creating these tiny intricate carvings. It must take incredible patience and control. There are some very cool ideas.

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Previously I mentioned that Toe‘s photographer Yoshiharu Ota was exceptionally good. Then Martine told me that he was brother to the singer of the band Envy, which I’ve long enjoyed. So now, I found more of his stuff and indeed, continue to be impressed.

In his band photography especially, he manages to extract moments of particularly potent visual lyricism from the maelstrom of a live show, and presents them in single slices of radiant time. The more I look at them, the more I realize that they don’t “feel” silent. Or rather, their stark silence belies, in shocking contrast, an atmosphere with sound at its core. It’s impossible to imagine the scenes without inferring a feeling of aural energy permeating that place and time; everything is drenched with it.

Check out his website, “scape for us” and blog for more of Yoshiharu Ota and his excellent work.

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Ran across another nice Japanese page of urban ruins images today. They are all taken with a very perceptive eye for composition and a marked warmth of expression. Click on “?????” (gallery) on the left for the photos. And click “???” (link/s) for a huge list of other great jp ruins sites.

I should probably make some image posts with my own shots of various places, but I’ll have to come up with a nice format for that type of thing first…

Update: 11/29/06 Added more links from other sites, great stuff.

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