Life in Five Hundred Million Years’ Time — Yōichirō Kawaguchi: beyond AI
Period: June 26 (Wed.) – October 27 (Sun.) 2019
‘Let’s imagine what it will be like five hundred million years into the future, a time when humankind may no longer exist.’ So says Yōichirō Kawaguchi, a pioneer computer graphics artist who has been active on the world stage since the seventies. This is not simply a fancy. His ‘Life in Five Hundred Million Years’ Time’ is created using a computer program based on data regarding the development of shape, growth and evolution that are then simulated mathematically according to an established rule. Learning from the history of the course taken by life over the last five hundred million years, it creates an image of how it will evolve over the next five hundred million years. The thing that first springs to the eye is the ‘spiral vortex’ that undulates along the axis of time. ‘There can be no life in a universe that does not create a vortex. The origin of all life is a vortex.’ So saying, Kawaguchi has continued to use his own ‘growth model’ to express the birth and energy of life. Tarō Okamoto also left a work that expresses the birth and energy of life. This is the ‘Tree of Life’ that he created inside the Tower of the Sun for the Osaka Expo. In this work he gave the ‘Time of Life’ a form, covering a period of four billion years, but the evolution he portrayed ended with the appearance of Cro-Magnon man. In a certain context, this experiment of Kawaguchi’s to portray life five hundred million years into the future can be said to be a continuation of Tarō’s ‘Tree of Life’.