Life Born from Trajectories

2013

The range that the physical human eye can see at any given moment is narrow and the focus is shallow. In other words, when we look at a space, we are creating that space in our brains by logically reconstructing a set of narrow and shallow partial planes that go back in time to some extent. The space that we perceive with our physical bodies is a reconstruction of a set of partial planes that combined are much larger than the parts that we perceive when we capture the whole space with a photographic lens. And since these parts form a set, it contains the concept of time.

The amount of time may increase to synthesize and reconstruct the image in

Ultrasubjective Space, meaning people may have spent more time cognizing each moment than we do today. This may have been why, around the 18th century, ukiyo-e artists in the Edo Period started to draw rain with lines (Fig. 1), such as the lines drawn by Hiroshige Utagawa to show rain in, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi bridge and Atake (1857) (Fig. 2). Despite the fact that European art at this time did not depict rain with lines (Fig. 3), Vincent van Gogh copied the technique (Fig. 4).

In pre-modern East Asian paintings, water, such as rivers and oceans, was often depicted as a collection of lines (Fig. 5, Fig. 6), and this collection of lines seems to have a sense of life, as if it were a living thing.

When the particles that make up water, a fluid, are perceived over a longer moment in time, the movements of the physical particles create lines. At that time, the fluid water, which is a continuum of particles, becomes a set of lines drawn in three-dimensional space. And when that set of lines is translated into a two-dimensional space via ultrasubjective space, the boundary between the viewer and the world of the artwork disappears. The viewer may even feel they are a part of that set of lines, and may begin to feel life within it.