Kanazawa_museum_20031018

Digital Kakejiku-
The theme of Hasegawa's own artistic project, entitled 'Digital Kakejiku' (or D-K), is the perception of that interval. Over three
nights in April 2003, Hasegawa projected a series of unrelated abstract pictures (all previously created by him with a computer) onto the exterior surfaces of Kanazawa Castle, complemented by music from composer Ryoji Ikeda piped through thirty speakers distributed across the castle grounds - the intent was to totally immerse the audience.
Although the images were changed at one-minute intervals, there were no abrupt transitions. They were smoothly blended into one another by a computer constantly calculating the intervening states and updating the projection. The source images were lost in the flux, merging into a single seamless animation. There was no goal, no evolution, no climax. The beginning and end moments were arbitrary. The gradual movement was barely noticeable. At a glance, it seemed perfectly still, but look away for a minute, and it would be totally transformed.


The Kanazawa Castle installation was the first major D-K event, repeated in October at the construction site of Kanazawa's 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa). Several other D-K installations have been realized or are in planning, but Hasegawa has been developing the technique itself for a decade. His early experiments used computer monitors, and later shifted to video projectors. Hasegawa sees D-K as an architectural material, able to actively engage and transform any context, applicable at scales ranging from urban event to computer screensaver. It is practically impossible to freeze-frame exactly the same image twice, and the possibilities of infinite variation have already attracted wide attention: D-K images have been commissioned to convert identical, mass-produced items into unique artifacts, from Mitsubishi Bank credit cards to Issey Miyake fabrics to the billboards at the Nagano Winter Olympics.