The Formation of CTG and the 1960s

CTG (the Computer Technique Group)^*1 was founded in 1966. I was studying product design at Tama Art University when I met Haruki Tsuchiya, who was a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, and we had a plan, or should I say wild ambition, to draw pictures using a computer. In the end, CTG had 10 members from various backgrounds – art, engineering, etc – and we had different tastes as well.
Back in the 1960s, computers were these incredibly huge machines that are almost impossible to imagine nowadays. At the time, airplane manufacturers like Boeing or automobile manufacturers like General Motors had just introduced CAD as a computer-based design tool. Plotters^*2 and other display devices were far from common, and they were also extremely expensive. There was a data center in Kanda Iwamotocho in Tokyo that was shared by a construction company and a shipbuilding company, but the cost of using their mainframe computer was 1 million yen per hour. The plotter cost 10,000 yen per hour. It was that expensive. We got help from IBM Japan to realize our works.

The Birth of Interactive Media Art

In the meantime we got to know Jasia Reichardt^*4 who was the assistant director at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts)^*3 in London. She invited us to participate in her show Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer and the Arts^*5. This was at the end of 1967, I believe. The exhibition itself started in February 1968. We exhibited a couple of works from the Computer is a good illustrator series that was based on a photo of John F. Kennedy, along with Return to a Square, Running Cola is Africa!, Deformation of Sharaku, and some pattern drawings. All of them got pretty good reviews.
In the same year, we had a show featuring only computer art at Tokyo Gallery in Ginza called Media Transformation through Electronics.^*6 At that show we presented Automatic Painting Machine No. 1, which was the first work of interactive media art. It had an input system consisting of sound sensors and light sensors so that it could sense the light and sounds of the surroundings, and those signals were then converted and output so that the machine painted pictures on a canvas. There were eight pillars standing in the input field with a microphone on top of each, and when they perceived sounds, a spray gun mounted on an arm moved vertically and horizontally across an upright canvas, painting a picture by blowing yellow, magenta, cyan and black acrylic paint onto it.

The Possibilities of Expression through Programming and Topological Transformations

For Computer is a good illustrator, we enlarged the halftone dots in a small photograph of Kennedy and generated the X-Y coordinates for each black dot. There were no scanners or anything like that back then, so all of the coordinates had to be entered by hand. They were entered as two-digit numbers and then a program that Tsuchiya had written read them all in. Since the coordinates of the halftone dots were at a 45 degree angle, the data for this piece was also arranged at a 45 degree angle. We generated 10 random points around each dot and connected them, so we called the piece Random Walk Kennedy. When I think about it now, the series title Computer is a good illustrator was quite provocative.
In Return to Square we used a female profile from Vogue magazine as data, entered the coordinates inside a square frame and generated intermediate values. This work was well received because it changed the shape while maintaining the same topology.
Running Cola is Africa! used an image of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic 100 meter gold medalist Bob Hayes at the moment of take-off, a Coca Cola bottle, and a map of Africa. Mixing these three totally unrelated images of different sizes, we generated intermediate values using topological transformations and connected them in order to depict the changing form. The calculations didn’t take that long.

Toward the Age of Information Design

I believe that design will shift from the design of goods to the design of information, and as the design target moves from objects to information, the user interface will become increasingly important, whether we want it or not. It might even become all-important. The iPhone is a good example. We will soon be in a situation where we can convey our intentions through more direct notions and ideas. Since our thoughts will be reflected as they are, there will no longer be any need to fit in a graphical interface between input and output. When that happens, the need for graphical icons etc. may also come out in another form.

*1 CTG (Computer Technique Group)

A computer art group formed around Masao Kohmura, Haruki Tsuchiya, Kunio Yamanaka and Junichiro Kakizaki as its core members. Besides computer graphics, the group presented works using formats and methods that foreshadowed media art. The group dissolved in October 1969.

*2 Plotter

Computer output device for printing vector images. A plotter can draw high-resolution images on large sheets by moving a pen or other drawing tool across the paper, and is mainly used for drafting and CAD applications. It can make complicated line drawings, but since the pen is moved mechanically the drawing speed is very slow.

*3 ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts)

An artistic and cultural center in London, UK. Since its establishment in 1946, it has actively supported avant-garde and experimental art and culture. The facilities include galleries, a theatre, two cinemas, a bookshop, and a bar.

*4 Jasia Reichardt

Curator, critic. From 1963 to 1971 she was assistant director of the ICA, and curated the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer and the Arts about the computer as a medium of expression in 1968, when even mainframe computers were just beginning to spread.

*5 Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer and the Arts

The first large and complex exhibition of computer art, held at ICA in 1968. Works by artists were shown on an equal footing with engineering CG and system demonstrations by engineers, scientists and corporations. It was a historical exhibition that became the starting point for media art to this day.

*6 Computer Art: Media Transformation through Electronics

CTG’s first and only solo show, held at Tokyo Gallery in Ginza in September 1968. While silkscreen prints of CG works were also on display, the centerpiece was Automatic Painting Machine No. 1. The exhibition was visited by Isamu Noguchi, Shigeo Fukuda, Shiro Kuramata, Katsumi Asaba, and many other famous creators in different fields.

The 80s Were Full of Uncritical, Positive Energy

In the 1980s, the world of personal computing was developing rapidly in opposition to IBM’s large mainframe computers. Japan was at the peak of the bubble economy. As part of the company’s image strategy Seibu Department Stores erected a building called WAVE in Roppongi in Tokyo with a cinema in the basement, a record store on the second and third floors, and a digital recording studio and CG production company called SEDIC on the top floor. I was involved with the founding of that CG production company.
Since the visual impact of computer graphics was very strong, we received requests from all sorts of clients who wanted to use CG. Our workload in 1982-84 was unbelievable. The first time I went to SIGGRAPH^*1 was in 1982 when it was held in Boston, and I was still preparing for the launch of SEDIC. For instance, I remember watching a video demonstration by E&S, who were famous for their flight simulator, and they had added a texture image of the waves on the sea surface that made it possible to see that the plane was moving forward. Previously it had been difficult to determine whether the plane was moving forward or standing still, but now it was clear thanks to the texture. That was the state of the art back then. Seeing how CG got closer to reality step by step at SIGGRAPH was a great experience.
Later CG moved in the direction of photorealism^*2, but I still find the simple CG of the early days when there weren’t even any shadows more interesting. Because of the way they were made, they could express a reality that couldn’t actually exist in real life. Since there was no superfluous information, the expression was straight and powerful.

Starting to Question Technology

At first it was fun just to let the computer draw pictures, but gradually my interest shifted to the question of how technology is changing our perceptions. In the case of perspective during the Renaissance, for example, it was a sense that people already had that surfaced as a technology, but now technology seems to be running ahead of the human senses. There is something grotesque about technology, due its inherent nature, that factors like whether it is simple or cheap or fast, economically efficient, convenient or rational take priority, and human sensations and experiences are then determined by those factors. People used to say that “what’s the point of going to sightseeing spots after looking at the postcards?” but now with Google Street View you can see the whole place on your monitor. The result is that experiences in the real world also vanish. Google Street View is certainly very interesting, but it is also extremely dangerous at the same time.
New technologies unconsciously change our visual understanding. When that happens, the experiment regarding what it is that changes in our sensations and perceptions becomes even more important than the technology itself. It becomes essential for creators to adopt a stance that takes these matters into consideration as well, I think.

The Need for Critical Thinking in the Age of Information Technology

In art history, Contemporary Art is often thought of as the period that comes after Modern Art, but that is not the case. In the first place, the word “contemporary” means “of the same age,” meaning that it is free from historization, and basically shouldn’t be formalized as part of history. Contemporary art is not a genre. By looking at the world from a contemporary perspective, we can overcome regional differences and differences in time. It is a declaration of taking that point of view.
The problem is that since 20^th century art posited “the concept” as the apex of human creativity, a hierarchical structure was created where technology serves to realize that concept. While various media were invented in the real world and caused the map of the world to be redrawn, 20^th century art didn’t refer to these things directly. Even though we are surrounded by all these new media technologies that make fools of us in the current state of affairs – or at least, so it seems to me – 20^th century art excluded technology.
Nobody would have thought we would see a world where everybody everywhere has a smartphone, and reacting critically to this situation is an important theme for artists, I think. What are these new media trying to show us anyway? Manufacturers like Apple will hardly give us the answer. It is up to us users to think about and explore new ways of using them. This is where we artists and creators play the most important role.

Does the Fusion of Expression and Technology Lead to Creation?

For the media, the paper-centered era is over, that is to say, the era of giving explanations in writing. But it is not an era of alluring viewers with visual shocks like television anymore either. It is relationships that are going to be important for future media, I think. The relationship between what is shown on the screen and the viewer. For example, what might happen when you click on the screen, what sort of relationships that will give rise to. If we think in terms of advertising, it is about creating a relationship with the product, and the important thing has become to raise the user’s curiosity enough to make them click. Here it becomes impossible to separate the interface from the contents, but many people have not yet noticed that the traditional division of labor between distribution media and content creation will no longer work.
Artists’ and creators’ mode of creativity has changed. We can now design this type of relationships through the mediation of computers, but in order to do so we need to learn programming. Programming is to write a work procedure for the computer to do the job, and the computer will then follow that procedure to the letter. Consequently, if you give it incorrect instructions, the output will also be wrong. That won’t do in engineering, perhaps, but sometimes it can be interesting as well. Your mistakes lead to unpredictable results. And unless unexpected things occur, there won’t be any true creativity either. It is quite exciting to think about how one might be able to induce this.
That is why anybody who aims to become a designer should definitely study programming. If you don’t know how to program, the tools will end up using you instead. Conversely, programmers will also have to start thinking about the contents as part of their own work. Unless they tell the designers what they can do with the technology, it becomes a mere subcontracting job, just a pursuit of convenience and rationality. Unfortunately, the Japanese are much better at pursuing that kind of rationality than at creating new concepts. That is a big problem.

*1 SIGGRAPH

An abbreviation of Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH is a subcommittee of the American Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Since 1974 it has held an annual international conference specializing in computer graphics. Initially, it was a small gathering of less than 1,000 people. After growing rapidly through the 80s, the number of participants reached its peak of almost 50,000 in the late 90s, but has since stabilized at around 15,000 visitors every year. At the Boston conference in 1982, when Fujihata took part for the first time, the number of participants was 17,000. Since 2008, SIGGRAPH Asia is also held every year in Asia.

*2 Photorealism

Given that images taken with a camera with an optical lens are visually real, there was a time when CG was aiming for the same level of achievement. This was called “photorealism.” Today, when most of the problems have been solved and it is possible to generate images that are almost indistinguishable from photographs, the movie compositing techniques formerly known as SFX (Special Effects) have practically fallen out of use.

The Computer as a Tool

In the early 70s I was already doing stuff with computers. This was long before there were any personal computers, so I had to type my programs from scratch, line by line on punch cards in a language called FORTRAN^*1. Then when I became a designer I was working with my hands and had nothing to do with computers at all for a while, but when the Macintosh came out I took it up again.
 There were computers, but what really got me into the whole idea of using technology as a means of expression – for music, design, and creating things in general – was electronic music. Synthesizers and samplers, and the analog electronic instruments before that, these were the things I was crazy about when I was a kid.
 The reason I use a computer to design now is because I feel it is necessary as a tool. I don’t feel feverishly absorbed in it, the way I did with electronic music.

The Infrastructure of Sensitivity in the Internet Age

Until then, musical instruments were something you built by bending metal or cutting wood. The sounds they produced were considered beautiful, while the sounds made by electronics were dismissed as noise, like buzzer tones. When the first synthesizers appeared they were treated as these weird contraptions, but eventually musicians came along who could play them properly and started making cool sounds that nobody had heard before, and gradually the sounds from the electronic circuits seemed more and more beautiful. It wasn’t the sounds themselves that had changed, but the way people felt about them.
Similarly, the mechanisms of the Internet would also have the same effect, I believed. When it became commonplace, it would surely change the way people felt about it. What kind of view of the world would people have at that time? What we were trying to achieve with Sensorium was to create an infrastructure for that sensibility.
When we began working on Sensorium, everything was done for the very first time. Not even the Internet environment was in place as an infrastructure when we started, that’s how new it was. We were a group of people with various ideas and realizations who had gathered for the project. It was nothing like making a sculpture together according to sketches drawn beforehand; it was a more interesting situation where everybody was reaching into the toolbox at the same time. “Oh, so this is what the Internet is really like,” I thought.
But by the time the newness of the mid-90s had become commonplace, I realized that the sense of sharing wasn’t that strong after all. It was at the next stage, with Open Source and Wiki and all that, where many different people had a finger in the pie and watched a single thing take form based on that general idea. It wasn’t exactly a sense of collaboration, but rather a method one step beyond sharing. Perhaps that was when I finally felt what the Internet was really supposed to be like.
Sensorium won the Golden Nica award at Ars Electronica^*2 in 1997 and it was decided to make a permanent exhibition, but the first thing we said was that we wouldn’t show it on PC screens. Instead we created a device that you could touch and let you physically feel the earth’s surface temperature as sensed from space in real time. By then, Sensorium was already not only about the audiovisual senses. That was the way we did it from the beginning, since the dawn of the Internet, long before there were any concepts like IoT, and that image hasn’t changed over all these years.

Visual Expression and Physical Sensations

The first time I used Adobe Illustrator and PostScript when they came out, I was astonished at how easily I could draw curves that I could never draw with a ruler or a Rotring pen, but in the beginning those Bezier curves^*3 were quite disconcerting. For example, the lines that appear when you bend an elastic object depend on the object’s physical characteristics and on the tension at the moment the force is applied. Those lines are really completely different from the curves drawn purely mathematically, unrelated to the dynamic necessities.
Until I got used to working with computers, I felt tremendously uncomfortable about the unpleasant shapes that were being drawn. Even though almost all my work is done with computers, that discomfort is something I still feel, and I still prefer to draw the initial shapes by hand. Actually, I think there are many people like that. Whether you push forward with a purely visual expression, or whether you combine the visual expression with bodily sensations has a great effect on how the information is conveyed, and how good the user feels when receiving it, I believe.

Thinking about How to Use Technology

For instance, there was a time in graphic design when people consciously chose to do dot representations with coarse lines. It was something that had been taboo in images before, since it leads to moiré effects due to the image resolution. But as a result of the dramatic increase in computational power, it became possible to include analog-like fluctuations with acceptable quality as well, and suddenly we started seeing lo-fi expressions. The progress of technology sometimes brings about such retrograde phenomena. Then the question is what you do with them.
 For me, the computer is like a pencil. There are various ways of dealing with it, but for my work as a designer, the computer is a tool. However, I also have an engineering side, and in the information environment the word “tool” has slightly different implications, I think.

*1 FORTRAN

Invented by John Backus at IMB in 1954, it was the first high-level language in the history of programming. It made the description of mathematical calculations simple, and featured easy input and output.

*2 Ars Electronica

A festival for cutting-edge art, technology and culture that started in 1979. Based in Linz, Austria, it has been held as an independent event every year since 1986. In addition to the festival, the Ars Electronica Center focuses on the development of state-of-the-art technologies that link artistic expression, scientific exploration and social activities.

*3 Bézier curve

A curve in N-1 dimensions obtainable from N control points, independently proposed by Paul de Casteljau at the French auto maker Citroën and Pierre Bézier at Renault. It is utilized by Adobe Illustrator and other applications to draw smooth curved lines on a computer.

Design on the Boundary Line

When we started Semitransparent Design in 2003, it was trendy for product design in particular to be called “anonymous.” To melt into daily life, became transparent, that sort of attitude. Not something to use for decoration but something that faded away. I think it was an idea that could be traced back to Minimal Design.
Since the times were like that, we were aiming for a kind of immaturity, but as an antithesis we also wanted to include a doubt whether design really should be transparent, so we added “semi” to the name and called our company Semitransparent Design.

The Equivalence Brought by SNS

The appearance of Social Network Services was shocking. I had always been a web designer, but around the beginning of 2000 I honestly thought that graphic design seemed more interesting. But the feeling of communication through SNS was so much fun that I got completely absorbed in the web for good. When I started using SNS I thought it was a world only for geeks, but with the spread of smartphones ordinary people rapidly got into it too, and as it became normal to treat the digital world and the real world equally, the amount of general information increased as well. Meanwhile, the old geek stuff seems to be vanishing.

Imagination for the Reality of the Future

Recently, there was this terror attack in Paris in November, 2015. I learnt about this event through the “I’m safe” alerts that my friends were posting on Facebook. Until very recently, the route used to be that you heard about some incident and wondered how your friends were doing, if they were OK, and then you felt relieved when you were able to contact them. But now you are alerted to the fact that they are safe before you even knew that the incident had occurred. You are never kept on tenterhooks so you get this weird feeling instead. Maybe it’s just another part of our reality since the Internet.
If we probe deeper into such issues, what will society be like when our current technologies are aggregated with AI and Deep Learning and whatever comes next? What will be considered real? It is important for creators to reflect on such matters while they are making things. Then your expressions naturally become fresh and you can achieve interesting expressions without relying on technology, I believe.

Pride as a Pro

It’s not at all uncommon for amateurs to make interesting discoveries by chance, I think. The applications will take care of the technical aspects, so the result won’t be inferior to the work of pros in that respect either.
 But this situation doesn’t worry me. I believe that a real pro has to be able to show things nobody has seen before, things that will change your perspective. The ability to recognize and “diagnose” that things that currently are not considered beautiful, things not even conceived of in the context of beauty, are in fact beautiful is something you only gain when you have looked at a fair amount of things and created quite a few things yourself.
Such things tend to accumulate in my daily work, and from time to time I try to show them at an exhibition or something. Well, sometimes I don’t really know what it is that I want to show at the time of the exhibition. But even if I don’t understand what I’m doing I keep on doing it, hoping it may present a foundation for future expressions that will make people feel a new sense of beauty.
Quality-wise, it’s a given that the process will become increasingly automatic as long as everybody is using computers, which makes me think even harder about the reason for being a pro.

Having a Go at Challenges Outside Your Own Domain

Maybe it’s because I come from a natural science background, but there are mathematicians who spend their whole life trying to solve a problem without even knowing whether it actually has an answer. Creators are very similar, I think. I keep doing things that I know might ruin my whole career, but if I refrained from doing them, I feel I would never make any progress.
Since current media generally use the Internet, I have to work out how to express the sort-of reality I feel there in order to find future expressions beyond that.
What we think is beautiful now surely won’t remain beautiful forever. I think what a graphic designer is doing is a constant search for beauty outside the current norms of beauty.
When I leaf through old graphic yearbooks, there are works that still haven’t aged at all. Those works probably looked a bit heterogeneous at the time as well, but I assume the graphic designers thought them through to their logical conclusions. We must never lose that exploratory spirit, that willingness to take on new challenges.

Things that Machines Can’t Do for Us

Interface Design is not moving in the direction of promoting individuality, but of becoming easy for everybody to use. Such things will soon be entrusted to AI, I think. For example, gathering data in the background without the user noticing, and automatically reassembling the interface according to each user’s inclinations – that is something AI might be able to do. This is an exciting future in itself, of course, but it is even more interesting to think about what will remain for humans to do.
 If we subtract all that machines automatically can do from what humans can do, the stuff that remains are the things that really only humans can do. Not everything needs to be efficient. Even if something is an error for a computer, there may be times when a human seeing it may feel saved. That’s because technology belongs solely in the world of language, but people have various non-linguistic ways too.

The Computer as a Gateway to Various Genres

What the computer is for me? I don’t know... I guess it’s a device for connecting to the Internet. The Internet is still a medium we look at with our eyes, but I believe it will eventually become transparent, the way electricity is in our daily lives today, for example. Now we use devices like computers and smartphones to connect to the Internet, but we usually aren’t particularly aware of the fact that we are connected. That’s why I think the Internet is currently a semi-transparent medium. In that sense, it’s the same as with our company name, Semitransparent Design.
Names and natures don’t necessarily agree, but I love being on the borderline. I don’t want to answer either-or. Since we are working across various different areas, all sorts of jobs keep coming in. As a result it often happens that I have to do something I’ve never done before and I feel like a novice. I’m always like an amateur.
If there were no computers, I would need to hone my skills. But since computers can do many of those tasks for me, I much prefer to remain an amateur. That’s the sort of tool the computer is, I think. If there were no computers, I wouldn’t be able to do this job.

Experiments with Connecting Human Senses to Other People

In the cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1986) by William Gibson^*1, connecting to the cyberspace created by computers is called “jacking in.” I’m trying to extend that notion slightly and thinking about how to jack into other kinds of entities^*2 that are not like us, such as drones, and how to jack into other people.
If you could jack into the sensorial world of somebody who was working on something, perhaps the two of you could collaborate. For example, if an expert could remotely enter into the senses of somebody working in the field, the expert could smoothly guide the work. Or the other way around, if the person at the scene is a top athlete participating in the Olympics, the audience might be able to feel for themselves the athlete’s transcendental experience almost as if they themselves were that athlete. That’s what it means to jack into other people.
In order to experiment with this, I created a wearable omnidirectional camera called JackIn Head that allows you to see all sorts of images from the wearer. Alongside this project, I’m researching how to connect the abilities of different people.

Switching between Subjective and Objective Points of View

I’m also experimenting with “jacking out,” that is to say out-of-body viewing. By jacking into a drone, you can secure a viewpoint from outside of yourself. If you practice sports from that viewpoint, for example, you can check out your form.
 This is important not just in sports, but in the field of art and design as well. You can go back and forth between watching an object subjectively and seeing it objectively, or in other words, jacking in to experience it subjectively and jacking out to experience it from further away. This corresponds directly to a switch in viewpoints.
Are you familiar with the Tsuruzu shitae wakakan (Anthology with Crane Design) picture scroll by Tawaraya Sotatsu^*3? It’s a handscroll with poems and flocks of cranes in gold paint, but no matter how you look at it, those cranes appear to be depicted as seen from the sky. That is to say, from a drone’s point of view. Sotatsu was standing on the ground looking up, of course, but it is exactly as if he was jacking out to create a point of view from above, and then jacked in and out inside his head to observe how the cranes were flying while he was painting.
Now you don’t need to be a genius like Sotatsu anymore; you might be able to secure the same kind of viewpoint with a drone. In that sense, experiences that were only available to geniuses in the past, like moving one’s viewpoint outside of oneself and letting it fly around freely, may now be available to anyone, thanks to the power of technology.

A Network Where Self and Other Are Not Fixed

There is one’s self, and then there are other people. This relationship has long been considered fixed, but with the development of networks and technology this relationship too may gradually change. There are tasks that you previously could only do by yourself, but soon other people or AI will come in to help perform the work collectively, I think.
 In the insect world, that is pretty much how things normally work, of course. An ant, for example, can’t do much by itself, but a group of ants can build an extremely huge nest and move around systematically. Such groups are called superorganisms and create a sort of network to do things that individuals can’t do. Human societies are also a kind of superorganisms, and I think the time will come when we will let our abilities interact much more closely by jacking into the network.

Transparent Interfaces

When your knees are working normally, you don’t feel the knee interface, but as soon as your knees start to hurt you become aware of the interface. The interface only becomes obvious when things aren’t going as they should; when everything is running smoothly you forget that it exists. That is the ultimate goal of technology, I think, something that exquisitely enriches daily life, without having to worry about it. Something that works so smoothly that you forget it even exists.
However, when things don’t run smoothly you may suddenly get concerned with the setup interface. In that sense, interfaces are still at the development stage, but they are gradually getting closer to an unnoticeable layer. That’s the major trend right now, I think.

The Fusion of Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence

I think that jack-in technology will be practically available around 2020. Beyond that, there is the question of which is superior, human intelligence or artificial intelligence, and what is often called the Singularity. But perhaps it’s not so important which is better after all. A more vital question will be how to combine human intelligence and artificial intelligence. In chess, for example, computers have already been stronger than the human World Champion for over a decade now, and it might seem that artificial intelligence has thereby overtaken humans. But actually, there is an even stronger contender, namely a team formed by computers and humans. How to realize such combinations is something I’d like to work on for the next 45 years.
For me, the computer is the ultimate toy. It’s a toy, but there’s no fixed way of playing with it. Perhaps it would be better to liken it to a sketchbook. Or something like LEGO, a material that has no fixed rules for how to play with it. It’s up to each user to decide what to build with it. That is what makes it interesting. The possibilities of the computer are still far from exhausted, I think.

*1 William Ford Gibson

American novelist and science fiction writer. The concept of cyberspace is first introduced in his short story “Burning Chrome” (1982).

*2 Entity

In computer terminology, a set of data or meanings that are subject to reference and association.

*3 Tawaraya Sotatsu

Painter active in Kyoto in the early 17^th century. Although hugely influential, much of his biography is unclear. His masterpieces include the Wind God and Thunder God Screens, and Water Fowl in the Lotus Pond, both in Kyoto National Museum.