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It moves, so does my heart.

What makes our heart keep moving, and what makes our inhibited heart be free again? Our heart would be inherently affected and moved because everything is literally moving. To test the hypothesis, Shoji Pixels was made to be a "2.5D" display device with 100 paper-made moving rods.

This is a kinetic Media Art named "Shoji Pixels (障子ピクセルズ)" intended for submission to 18th Media Arts Festival in 2014, Japan. The main theme of this work is "It moves, so does my heart." I hypothesized that human minds are both moved and stopped by external dynamic world and thus I posed the following question; what happens, when humans face depth-present images morphing in shape and changing in color, and what happens, when we can cotrol those images as we like? If you stand in front of this device, the answers may come to your minds.

Shoji paper is commonly used for sliding doors that let the sun light into rooms of Japanese traditional buildings. The device has 100 Shoji pixels, each of which moves back and forth actuated by a cheap servo motor and emits colored LED light.

All 400 signals, the colors and the positions, are independently controllable from an external PC and any 2.5D images can be displayed in real time, but you know, in a very low resolution. The device has been developed for over a year in my tiny room with one single CNC machine. To me, this device and all the processes to develop it moved my heart, afterall.

It is similar to or was inspired by many great works such as "Hyper Matrix" by Jonpasang, "inform" by MIT Media laboratory, "Hyposurface" by dECOI/MIT, "Movable-type printing demonstration (the actuators are PEOPLE!)" in Beijing Olympics 2008, "Headspace Spatial Robot Kinetic Sculpture" by Geoffrey Drake-Brockman, "Kinetic sculpture" at the BMW Museum, "Trush Mirror" and its relating works by Daniel Rozin, and all older works called Kinectic sculptures. I re-created those awesome works somewhat in a "media-artistic" way using common electric items and cheap materials, along with some Japan-traditional flavors and the theme that has long been in my mind.

"HyperMatrix"