Art Talk Podcast: Kenji Kojima's
Binary Interpretation of the Arles
Period of Van Gogh and Gauguin,
Bitwise Splitting and Merging of Pixels
Begins with Chaos - Lascaux,
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we're diving right into the work of an artist doing something really quite unique, taking these incredibly famous, sometimes ancient works of art, and, well, putting them through this 21st century digital lens. He's using binary code, you know, the zeros and ones, to reinterpret masterpieces. And in doing that, he's challenging some pretty fundamental ideas about what art is, how we perceive it, and maybe the big one, its value today.
Speaker 2: It's a fascinating idea bridging millennia, really, from the earliest cave paintings all the way to the pixels on our screens now, all guided by algorithms.
Speaker 1: Exactly. So we've been looking at sources describing two of Kenji Kojima's projects. They focus on how he digitally interprets and manipulates these classic pieces. Our mission here is to really unpack these projects, try to understand the techniques he's using, and get into the big questions he's raising about art in this digital age.
Speaker 2: Sounds good. Where do we start?
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. Let's start with the first project described. Binary interpretation of the Arles period of Van Gogh and Gauguin.
Speaker 2: Ugh, the Arles period. Van Gogh and Gauguin.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we all know the story, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Them together in Arles, 1888. Huge creative output, but also, well, the famous clashes. Yeah. The fallout.
Speaker 2: A really pivotal moment in art history, yeah. Two giants side by side. Collaborating, but also kind of combusting, personally.
Speaker 1: Right. And Kojima zooms right in on paintings from that specific intense period. His core concept, taking these, you know, physical paint on canvas works and interpreting them in binary terms, translating them into the basic language of the digital world.
Speaker 2: Okay, so he's taking something like the, I don't know, the expressive brushstrokes of a Van Gogh sunflower and converting that texture, that feeling, into just ordered sequences of zeros and ones. How does the source actually describe him doing that?
Speaker 1: Well, the videos that show the project, there's like an eight-minute compilation, and shorter ones on specific works that give a visual idea. Okay. You see paintings by Van Gogh and Gauguin next to each other. Often works on the same theme, which is interesting itself, like self-portraits or the Madame Roulin portraits, Madame Genoux.
Speaker 2: Right, comparing their takes.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Then they go through this digital transformation. The source says they're decomposed into color particles.
Speaker 2: Color particles. Yeah. Okay. Is that like pixels or something else?
Speaker 1: It seems like it's breaking the image down into its basic color data points, essentially. These particles are then, and this seems key, randomly arranged.
Speaker 2: Randomly.
Speaker 1: Randomly arranged first, and then they get reconstructed into what he calls a unified visual space.
Speaker 2: All right, so it's definitely not just making a digital copy. It's like taking it apart and putting it back together based on the data underneath. What happens when it gets reconstructed?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's where you get this really striking digital glitch effect.
Speaker 2: Ah, the glitch.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The artist explains it's caused by the misalignment of the zeros and ones from the binary data overlays on the images. It's like the digital version itself is kind of resisting a perfect copy.
Speaker 2: Interesting. So the errors are part of the point.
Speaker 1: Seems like it. And it's not just visual, there's sound too. Background sound is generated at the same time, based directly on the color data from the images.
Speaker 2: Wow, so the colors don't just look different, they actually sound different through this binary translation process.
Speaker 1: Exactly. The visual info directly creates the audio. He did this with specific Van Gogh-Arnold paintings, Self-Portrait and Gauguin's Armchair, the famous Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, the postman Joseph Roulin, even Dr. Gachet got the glitch treatment, plus some early studies.
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is how he links this digital work back to art history. He actually mentions the influence of Georges Seurat's pointillism.
Speaker 1: Ah, yeah, the dots.
Speaker 2: Right. Think about Seurat breaking images into tiny dots of color and your eye does the mixing. Kojima is doing something, well, analogous, but with algorithms breaking images into digital particles. It's this juxtaposition, isn't it? That organic, tactile painting from the 19th century meeting this synthetic algorithmic interpretation in the 21st.
Speaker 1: It really does feel like a digital echo of pointillism, doesn't it? Breaking down, rebuilding.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and by doing this to works we think of as having this fixed truth or originality, he's using algorithms to challenge those very ideas. If we connect this to the bigger picture, he's essentially using code as a new kind of lens. Bridging 19th century paint with 21st century binary, suggesting the truth of an image can be, well, found and even manipulated in its underlying data.
Speaker 1: That really twists how you normally think about just looking at a painting. Okay, ready for another jump? Because the second project takes us way back. Okay. It's called Bitwise Splitting and Merging of Pixels, begins with Chaos Lascaux.
Speaker 2: Let's go! The cave paintings!
Speaker 1: Exactly. He uses it to contrast what he calls mankind's first canvases, you know, the cave walls, with our digital screens today.
Speaker 2: Wow. That's a huge leap. Paleolithic to pixels.
Speaker 1: It is. And he uses this project to explore these really broad, almost philosophical themes. Things like human sensation, perception. the evolution from that prehistoric art to binary data, the relationship between chaos and order, perception and cognition, and this idea of new value created by technology. He sees them as metaphors for how art itself gets constructed, especially with tech involved now.
Speaker 2: So he's using Lascaux and digital techniques to ask fundamental questions about how we actually see and, well, make sense of the world.
Speaker 1: Precisely. Let's dig into that chaos and order idea first. It seems pretty central here. The artist views the world, just the raw world around us, as this massive amount of chaotic information.
Speaker 2: Right. Overwhelming.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And he thinks our five senses, which evolve for survival, they act like filters, or he uses the word keys, keys to decode parts of that chaos.
Speaker 2: So our senses are like specialized decoders, just pulling out what's relevant for us from all that noise.
Speaker 1: That's the idea. He gives examples. Eyes are keys for shape, for color. Deep sea creatures might use skin as a sensory key. Bats use sound waves. He suggests we might be missing or just ignoring other potential ways of sensing things because we rely so heavily on the main five. Our sense organs, through evolution, basically construct our reality by pulling out specific bits, visual, auditory, whatever, from that chaos, using the key for that sense.
Speaker 2: The idea that our perception is just one possible decoding of a chaotic reality.
Speaker 1: And he applies this idea directly to how he makes that really complex color mosaic you see at the start of the video for this project.
Speaker 2: OK, that mosaic looked intricate.
Speaker 1: Right. He uses a cryptographic technique. It's called a one-time pad.
Speaker 2: Cryptographic. One-time PAT. Okay. Sounds like code breaking. How does that work with images?
Speaker 1: It's fascinating. He takes the color information from an image and basically encrypts it. He uses something called a bitwise XOR operation with random numbers.
Speaker 2: Bitwise XOR. Okay. Refresh my memory.
Speaker 1: Think of it like comparing two binary numbers, bit by bit. If the bits in the same position are the same 0 and 0, or 1 and 1, the result is 0. If they're different 0 and 1, or 1 and 0, the result is 1. It's a fundamental computing thing used for comparing scrambling data.
Speaker 2: Got it. Comparing bits. So he uses this XOR thing with random numbers on the color data.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Each little square in that mosaic has RGB color data. The random numbers he generates act as the key. If you XOR the encrypted data with the same random key again, you get the original color back.
Speaker 2: Ah, okay.
Speaker 1: So the chaotic-looking mosaic is the encrypted visual data, and the random numbers are the decryption key. He's literally splitting the image data into two parts, the scrambled code, which is the mosaic, and the key needed to unscramble it.
Speaker 2: That's wild. So the image becomes a kind of visual encryption puzzle, and the random numbers are the secret.
Speaker 1: And, get this, he says this mosaic is explicitly inspired by optical color mixing, like Surat again.
Speaker 2: Back to Point Lib.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the goal is to recreate the image, not by physically mixing colors on a canvas, but through this digital separation and decoding, using the one-time pad idea to split the data.
Speaker 2: So he's taking that historical idea, the viewer's eye, mixing the dots, and translating it into a digital process where the mixing happens using a cryptographic key. That's clever.
Speaker 1: Right. Then he moves on to perception and recognition. And this is where he explores converting visual information, color, into auditory information, sound.
Speaker 2: Color into sound. OK.
Speaker 1: He took color data specifically from the Lascaux cave paintings, converted that to binary, and then mapped the binary data onto a musical scale.
Speaker 2: Mapping color to sound. I mean, artists like Scriabin, Kandinsky, they explored synesthesia, right? One sense triggering another. But converting binary data derived from prehistoric paintings into music. Why Lascaux specifically for that? Was there something about those really ancient colors?
Speaker 1: The sources don't explicitly say why Lascaux for this bit, but it does tie back neatly to his theme of the first canvases, doesn't it? Maybe he sees the fundamental color data from our earliest art as this really rich source for exploring that kind of cross-media translation. His process was specific. He assigned the center of the RGB value to middle C, and then mapped the other values across a 12-tone musical scale.
Speaker 2: OK, so a very methodical mapping, not just random notes. Seems so.
Speaker 1: And in the video, you hear it. Randomly sampled RGB values from the Lascaux image generate musical notes played on piano, ocarina, and bell. It's a direct demo, isn't it? Taking binary data, which can represent anything, and translating it across senses, visual color to auditory sound.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really brings up that huge question for the digital age, doesn't it? If all information is fundamentally just binary data, what other sensory translations could be possible? Could we, I don't know, taste an image or feel a sound, conceptually speaking?
Speaker 1: Exactly. It pushes our ideas about perception beyond our current biological limits. And, you know, that leads us right into maybe the most provocative theme running through both these projects. Okay. His really challenging stance on the nature and especially the value of digital art.
Speaker 2: Ah, yes. He doesn't seem to hold back on this.
Speaker 1: He really doesn't. He believes the single greatest feature, the defining feature maybe, of digital art is its potential for unlimited reproduction.
Speaker 2: Right. Perfect copies, infinitely.
Speaker 1: And his argument is pretty direct, almost stark, he says. If a physical artwork, a painting, say, could be copied infinitely, perfectly, Its monetary value, as we currently think about it, would just evaporate.
Speaker 2: Which directly attacks what he calls the abnormal financial situation of art, which is embedded in capitalism. You know, the system where scarcity often equals value.
Speaker 1: Right. And he's crystal clear on his view of NFT art. He flat out states he thinks it's a financial product, not actual art.
Speaker 2: So he sees things like NFTs as just reinforcing the very money worship he's trying to critique and dismantle with his own work.
Speaker 1: That seems to be exactly it. His stated goal, he says, is to eliminate this excessive monetary worship around art to restore its connection with the viewer, return it to a, quote, normal, respectable value and ultimately maybe reform art. So it contributes to a new kind of aesthetic value for civilization. He even ties this into broader critiques in the sources about greedy materialism, money worship, even environmental harm.
Speaker 2: What's really interesting is how his techniques actually back this up conceptually. Ideas like visual memory or originality or even authorship. They get incredibly blurry when A.I. and algorithms can just decompose, randomly rearrange, reconstruct images, create glitches. Yeah. His methods, the particle decomposition, the random reconstruction, those glitches in the Van Gogh project or the cryptographic splitting in the Lascaux one, they aren't just cool visual effects, are they? They feel like part of this bigger argument, challenging our ingrained ideas about what makes something original or authentic.
Speaker 1: and therefore valuable, especially in a digital context.
Speaker 2: Exactly. They're part of the statement.
Speaker 1: It all circles back, yeah. And his core statement about 21st century art really sums it up. He says, it is not about what to paint, create, or possess, but about expressing the direction in which the medium is heading.
Speaker 2: So art isn't about the finished object you can own anymore. It's about exploring the tools, the process, the data underneath, the implications of the technology itself.
Speaker 1: That seems to be the idea, which explains his practical approach, right? The videos of his work free to share, free to download.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: He says you can donate if you want, but you can also just keep them if you don't. He's suggesting their artistic value isn't in a price tag. It's determined by you, the viewer, by your engagement with the work, with the ideas.
Speaker 2: It's a genuinely countercultural stance in the current art market, pushing back hard against that commodification trend.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for you listening? We've taken this deep dive into how one artist is using binary code, algorithms, digital manipulation, not just to remake famous art, but to fundamentally challenge how we understand perception, how we construct reality through our senses, and maybe most pointedly, the value we assign to art.
Speaker 2: We've traced these connections, haven't we, from Seurat's analog dots to digital pixels, from cave walls way back then to the screens we're all looking at right now, from visual color data turned into audible sound. And we've seen how technology, in this artist's hands anyway, forces us to reconsider what original even means anymore. What truly holds value? What is the essence of art now in a world where anything digital can be endlessly copied?
Speaker 1: So here's the final thought, maybe. If unlimited digital reproduction does eliminate monetary value, as he argues, and if art is now about exploring the direction of the medium, what does that mean for how you interact with art? How you assign value to it moving forward? Both the digital stuff you see online and the physical things in a gallery. Something to think about.
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/