Whole Dialog of the Video: Art Talk 2025 https://kenjikojima.com/
Let’s unpack this. We’re plunging into a deep dive today that sits right at the intersection of art, technology, and how we actually perceive the world. It’s all filtered through the fascinating work of one artist: Kenji Kojima.
What’s compelling is how his journey—from medieval painting techniques to manipulating binary code—reveals some profound ideas about the fundamental nature of art today.
The sources we’re using for this deep dive give us a really rich picture. We’ve got descriptions of his projects, like the binary interpretation of Van Gogh and Gauguin’s Arles period, and his bitwise splitting and merging of pixels applied to everything from Lascaux cave paintings to Seurat. There’s the Da Vinci Code project, plus insights from his biography and notes on his artistic process.
These specific projects aren’t just technical exercises. They are expressions of a core philosophy—one that sees both the world and data as essentially the same thing.
Our mission is to understand his central argument: that the world is essentially chaotic information, and our senses are the specific keys we use to decode it. All media in the 21st century is fundamentally binary—just zeros and ones. This radical perspective has big implications for art: its value, its role, and how we understand perception in the digital age.
It really pushes us beyond just looking at digital images or videos. It asks us to rethink the very foundation of how we experience and create in a world saturated with data.
So let’s trace his path a bit. It didn’t start with screens and code. Kenji Kojima, born in Japan, moved to New York City in 1980. For his first decade there, he was a painter working in contemporary egg tempera.
That’s a striking contrast. Egg tempera is a medieval technique using ground pigments and egg yolk. Though drawn to contemporary art, Kojima felt discomfort with its excessive material value. So he returned to ancient materials to understand the physical history of art firsthand.
He wasn’t unsuccessful. His early work was collected by institutions like Citibank and Hess Oil. But as the personal computer transformed everything in the late ’80s and early ’90s, his perspective shifted.
By the early 1990s, he pivoted completely to digital art. Part of that shift, according to his notes, came from ecological guilt over the waste of physical painting. Working on a computer felt clean and waste-free—lighter, and more aligned with a different kind of future.
This wasn’t just about using Photoshop. He taught himself programming, which eventually led to the development of his own software, RGB MusicLab, in 2007. This tool was crucial for exploring the image-music relationship that became central to his work.
At first, he imagined creating interactive software people could play with. But he ran into a common digital-age problem: software compatibility. Operating systems change constantly. So instead, he pivoted to making video works that showed the software in action—a smart move that allowed him to share his work internationally at media art festivals.
Even after COVID, when physical access was limited, he adapted again. He launched his “Musical Interpretation of Painting” series using online archives of classical images and transforming them into musical compositions.
A consistent thread emerges: he takes visual sources and reinterprets them, often musically, always digitally.
Which brings us to the heart of his artistic philosophy. What is he really trying to say about the world?
His central premise is that reality is fundamentally a stream of chaotic information. It’s overwhelming and formless—until something acts upon it. That “something” is us. Our senses.
He argues that our sensory organs—eyes, ears—aren’t passive receivers of raw data. They’re active filters. They extract specific components—like the visual spectrum or auditory frequencies—from underlying chaos.
He uses a powerful metaphor: our senses act like algorithms decoding a vast code.
Now here’s where the 21st century clicks into place. All media today—images, sound, text—is ultimately binary. Just zeros and ones. This binary stream is the chaotic information Kojima talks about.
And that’s why he works directly with it. He manipulates color pixels and data using bitwise operations. Binary, for him, is the fundamental material of our time—just like pigment and egg yolk once were.
Let’s look at his bitwise pixel-splitting technique. It was inspired in part by the challenge of creating new art in the age of generative AI. Kojima wanted to work with data AI couldn’t easily mimic—something fundamental.
This led him to cryptography. Specifically, the concept of the one-time pad.
He takes an image’s color data—binary numbers for RGB values—and combines it with random binary numbers using a bitwise XOR operator. This scrambles the image completely, creating a chaotic mosaic of colors (the cipher), while the random numbers serve as the key.
Here’s the fascinating part: if you take the cipher and apply the same XOR operation again using the same random key, the original image reappears—perfectly reconstructed.
This visualizes his philosophy: order from chaos, but only if you have the right key.
He also draws an analogy to Georges Seurat’s Pointillism. Seurat placed pure dots of color side by side. The eye did the mixing. Kojima sees his digital merging of cipher and key as similar: the binary operation (like the viewer’s eye) creates the final image from two distinct components.
This binary manipulation isn’t limited to visuals. Kojima bridges into sound—connecting back to RGB MusicLab.
He believes visual and auditory information, though they feel different, share a binary foundation. Both are code. He follows in the tradition of artists like Scriabin and Kandinsky—those who explored synesthesia, the connection between color and music.
His approach, though, is data-driven. He converts binary color data directly into musical scales using his RGB Music method.
Here’s how it works: he sets the center of the RGB range to middle C. Then, he maps color values systematically to the 12-tone chromatic scale. So different RGB values literally correspond to different musical notes.
In the Lascaux video, the piano and bell sounds you hear are generated directly from sampled RGB color values in the cave painting.
There’s a technical detail here: while a true one-time pad requires equal data for cipher and key, music generation takes longer. So he uses twice as much mosaic color data to create shorter music segments that match the video’s pacing.
The core concept remains: the artwork is the transformation of binary data from one form (color) into another (music).
He applies this concept to iconic art. His Van Gogh and Gauguin project focuses on their time in Arles—a period of intense creativity and conflict. Kojima decomposes these iconic 19th-century images into digital particles, scrambles them with binary noise, and layers on deliberate glitches.
Sound is generated simultaneously from the color data.
The result: videos that bridge the tactile world of 19th-century painting with the intangible, data-driven realm of 21st-century digital art.
In the age of generative AI, this raises deep questions: What is originality? What is authorship? By glitching and randomizing sacred images, he suggests that the artwork’s truth isn’t in its fixed form—but in the transformation itself.
He applies these ideas to Da Vinci’s portraits and Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte” too. His techniques are era-agnostic. Once digitized, any image can become binary data.
Alongside this, Kojima holds strong views on the current art market. He bluntly states: NFT art is not art. It’s a financial product.
His reasoning: digital art’s greatest feature is unlimited reproducibility. It can be copied perfectly and infinitely. The traditional art market values scarcity. That’s incompatible with digital reality.
NFTs, he argues, are attempts to artificially impose scarcity for financial gain. He wants to move beyond this—to restore art’s value based on its impact, not its price.
He even connects this obsession with uniqueness and money to environmental problems. He believes art must help society evolve toward a new aesthetic value system.
And this is where he makes his most striking claim:
Art in the 21st century isn’t about what to paint or create or possess anymore. It’s about expressing the direction the medium is heading.
So, the artistic act becomes about exploring the digital medium’s nature. Working with binary. Understanding how it shapes perception.
His distribution policy reflects this. His videos are free to download and share. Donations are optional. He even says: donate only if you want—even if you think the work has no value.
That radically challenges the idea that art’s worth is tied to ownership or price.
So what does this all mean—for you?
If the world is chaotic data, and your senses are keys to decode it, how does that resonate with your experience of information overload?
If all digital media—every image, song, and video—is just binary, does that change how you think about what you’re seeing and hearing?
What does unlimited reproducibility mean for ownership, value, or creativity—especially now that AI manipulates data so easily?
Kojima’s work challenges our comfort zones. He uses technology and art history as a mirror, reflecting our digital reality and our place within it.
From Lascaux to Van Gogh to Da Vinci, he filters history through cryptography, bitwise operations, and music theory—compelling us to consider our senses as limited decoders in a world of infinite data.
And maybe the final question is this:
If our senses are keys, what other keys could exist?
Or could we invent new ones to perceive the world in ways we can’t yet imagine?
Projects featured in the video：
Bitwise Splitting and Merging of Pixels
Begins with Chaos - Lascaux
https://kenjikojima.com/Lascaux/
Bitwise Splitting and Merging of Pixels
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
https://kenjikojima.com/bitwiseSunday/
Binary Interpretation of the Arles period of Van Gogh and Gauguin
https://kenjikojima.com/Binary-Interpretation/
Da Vinci Code / Mona Lisa / Ginevra de' Benci / The Lady with an Ermine /
https://kenjikojima.com/DaVinci/