I've always enjoyed taking things apart, understanding how they work, and then building something new. KIKAIMA comes from wanting to bring that interest in mechanics and programming together with my artistic work and other interests. I'm as interested in building the tool as I am in understanding what it might be capable of and discovering the questions that arise along the way.
Something has always intrigued me about drawing: chance, understood as everything that escapes the artist's control. I can decide how to make a brushstroke, but I can't control every bristle, or how each drop of ink will behave. These unforeseen events give a work some of its identity and make it unique and unrepeatable.
KIKAIMA is a constantly evolving project through which I want to explore the relationships between chance, reproduction and the creation of an aesthetic language. I want to develop algorithms that generate compositions, but also to observe what happens when a machine repeats exactly the same marks on a physical surface, and to discover which accidents emerge.
There is a certain irony in using artificial intelligence tools to develop a system that seeks almost the opposite of AI image generation. I don't want to create a digital image that imitates an artwork and then print it. I want to use algorithms to build an aesthetic language and transfer it onto paper using traditional painting tools and techniques, studying what happens between the precision of instructions and the unpredictability of their execution.
I don't want to define a fixed aesthetic in advance. As KIKAIMA develops, its limitations, mistakes and discoveries open up new possibilities. What begins as a mechanical test can become another line of inquiry, as happened with KIKAIMA X MICHI emerging from the development of KIKAIMA X SUMI. To me, the process matters as much as the works that may come out of it. KIKAIMA doesn't aim for a definitive result, but to explore what happens when programming, mechanics and physical materials meet, and how much room remains for the unexpected.