Kenjii Kojima Subway Synesthesia

Kenji Kojima’s Subway Synesthesia 

Since 1990, Japanese artist Kojima has been experimenting with the relationships between perception and cognition, mathematics, technology, music and art.  His lastest project is now on AC [Direct]. 

Kojima’s series of photographs New York City Subway are presented as diptychs that become the material for his animated digital performance and  musical color  installation. These photographs, along with simple text overlays, act as a sort of eye-to-mind primer that are then dissolved into thousands  of pixels of flowing colors. Through RGB Music, the pixel colors that flash on the screen are transformed into a series of musical compositions.  Subway Synesthesia consists of seven one and a half  minutes musical compostions. 

The more than 200 digital  images from Kojima’s New York City Subway photographs form a  Mondrian-like geometric of colors that correspond to a note or chord in a selected scale of music such as C minor or Blues Scale.  As these photographic musical variations manifest as song poems, the city’s underground, the subway, is transformed into music and color. Kojima digs beneath the surface buzz of New York to reveal the poetry and music within them.  As Kojima describes it, “is not an impression of a painting or a photograph of a musical variation. It composes a score from an image directly.” 

RGB Music now includes an interactive, synchronized 3-D drawing that follows the RGB values along an XYZ axis of the image. The lines become a distinct topography—a visual map of the both the musical score and photographic content. To experience this interactive component go to: http://www.kenjikojima.com/rgbmusiclab/

Born in Japan and  lives in New York City, Kenji Kojima is an accomplished artist, inventor and computer scientist who integrates both the visual and the technical. Concerns with knowing his medium have pushed him to build his own original tools from which to create his art. Kojima’s fascination with tempera painting techniques and early studies in design influence his current use and understanding of digital technology and art. Along with technical innovation and multi-disciplinary mastery, his pieces evoke poetry and humor throughout. Kojima’s work is archived at New Museum / Rhizome in New York. In both 1999 and 2001, he was selected by the Machida City Museum in Tokyo for excellence in Art on the Net. Born in Japan, Kenji Kojima has lived in NYC since 1980.

AC [Institute Direct Unlimited Chapel]  547 W. 27th St. 5th Floor  NYC 10001

 501(3) c non-profit space in New York City.   Free and experimental. 

AC[Chapel] current project is The bone  by Holly Crawford. It is  a  concrete poetry that removed the words and left only Clement Greenberg's punctuation from his 1939 article Avant-garde and Kitsch.

Other projects by AC have been Critical Conversations in a Limo NY, Melbourne & San Francisco; Sounnd Art Limo, NY & Melbourne & Flatland Limo NY.