Morphovision - twirling house: Toshio Iwai

A creative childhood
 led to a highly productive career
in art, video games and technology

This was an exhibit in the 2006 SIGGRAPH convention.  It was technologically far ahead of it's time, but originated in a child's flipbook sketches. Toshio Iwai, the media artist appears above (lower right).

At the actual exhibit, a tiny house twirled until images appeared.  It was controlled by a  touchscreen which gave the viewer math-related choices, such as sine waves, that would distort the twirling images. Here it is in motion! It was displayed in 2006, to show pioneering work on the development of 3D TV.  

"As a child, he spent time creating flip book-style animations in the corner of text books and making motor-driven mechanical toys, since these were the only technologies available to him." Toshio Iwai described how his childhood affected his later technological development work:

• "I've been longing for the feeling of my childhood in the digital world and that is why I've been sticking to relations among media, machine(s), and people through interactive works."[1]
• "All of my work begins with animation and never strays too far from it," he tells me. A simple flipbook animation fades in on his computer screen. "I started making these flipbooks when I was in about fourth grade," he explains, as a simple cartoon figure romps and morphs through its five-second life span. "This is one of the first ones. The margins of all my elementary school textbooks were filled with these. This is where my work begins. The excitement I got from making these animations has never disappeared - that and the fact that these are personal media, things you can carry around and look at alone."

By his own account, Iwai's childhood and schooling were normal. He was born in nearby Aichi Prefecture in 1962, the youngest of four children, and attended public schools. In true Japanese fashion, Iwai decided at age 10 on his adult occupation: animation and cartooning. Young Iwai also was beginning to acquire the sort of technical skills - basic electronics, soldering, et cetera - that would become the focus of his adult life. "My dad was kind of special in that he preferred to make toys with me rather than just buy me plastic models," Iwai says. "He was constantly making me electrically operated toys with motors and lights and moving parts, and he taught me how to make them as well. He gave me how-to books, tools, and materials. So, on the one hand, throughout elementary school I was trying to improve my flipbooks, and on the other, I was building radios and stuff. Eventually these two kinds of activity merged, and what I'm doing now is the natural result." [11]

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Video games and art...

"Iwai is the first internationally-recognized gallery artist also to have led the creation of several successful commercial video game projects. This cross-disciplinary ability typifies Iwai's career...

...But the work that took my breath away at that 1986 exhibition was Time Stratum II, a pair of large turntables spinning under transparent domes and illuminated by flickering TV monitors overhead. These turntables presented the viewer with swarms of 3-D figures - basically card-board cutouts - that seemed to rotate, dance, remove their heads, and otherwise transform themselves. The stroboscopic flickering of the monitors, the timing of the spinning disks, the spacing of the figures, and Iwai's soundtrack were all worked out with the utmost precision and were perfectly synchronized. The result was superb, unearthly animation. I watched it for 30 minutes or more and left thinking that Iwai, then 24, was a young artist with potential. How much potential, I scarcely suspected.

"Movement is still my greatest interest," says Iwai, sitting in the homey disarray of his studio at IAMAS. "I believe movement itself is a communicative language, and I'm trying to use it that way. If we see an interesting type of motion, say, a flock of birds turning in coordination, we often get involved in what it is that's moving - birds, in this case. But even if it were not birds, but just dots on a screen or something else equally abstract, we can still be totally engaged by it." And true, the desire that drives us to comprehend patterns of motion explains to a large degree the appeal of ballet, schools of fish, pinball machines, and swarms of ants. On a deeper level, our visual receptors are attuned to detect and analyze motion almost involuntarily - it's a basic part of our survival gear. And art that taps our fundamental survival instincts can play off our genetic code for raw animal power and adrenaline, even while we remain at a loss to explain our interest.[11]"

Games designed by Toshio Iwai

Otocky (1987; Famicom Disk System)

Sound Fantasy (canceled; Super Famicom)

SimTunes (1996, PC)

Bikkuri Mouse (びっくりマウス?) (2000, PlayStation 2)

Tenori-on (テノリオン?) (2001, WonderSwan)

Electroplankton (2005, Nintendo DS)

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from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshio_Iwai

[1] broken link Multimedia Content Association of Japan Multimedia Grand Prix'97 Winner's Profile 

[11] refers to "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek," by Azby Brown in Wired Magazine

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_iwai_pr.html