Today’s guest is Eto Koichiro, a man with a very wide range of creative talents and someone who is known for both his programming skills and creative design skills. He is currently working in technological research and today he is going to talk a little about his past and current projects.
Reported by Jon.
One of Eto Koichiro’s first major projects was what he calls the “Physical Model Of The Internet”. The idea of this was to create some kind of mechanical contraption that would show observers a simple physical model of how data moves around networks and the internet.
The machines use (lots of) ping pong balls to show how packet data gets sent by one client on a network and is received at the other end in the correct order.
He showed us a demonstration of this - it was very noisy, but fascinating to watch, like a kind of gigantic ping pong ball train set.
The next project Koichiro-san shared with us was his “Remote Piano”. This is where we begin to see another facet to the skills of Koichiro-san - music. The Remote Piano aimed to turn the conventional concept of a “concert” on it’s head and was an experiment in the “cooperation and communication of sound”. This project used network data contributed by users on the internet and combined it with sounds created live by Ryuichi Sakamoto to create “one” sound, complete with a graphical representation of the flow of the sound data. A highly colourful and expressive piece of performance art, with a solid grounding in cutting edge technology.
Next was “SoundCreatures”. Another project involving internet data and sound, this was also something of an art installation too. A stage was created for small noise-making “creatures” (robots) to roam around in. Visitors to the installation could interact with a Java applet that would make the creatures move around, and you could also adjust the pitch, speed etc of the sounds the robots were making. The robots would interact with each other according to proximity, to create variations on their sounds.
“Webhopper” was an experiment to show in graphical form the browsing habits of the world’s internet users. For example if a user was viewing an American page and then went to a European page, a line resembling a flight path would be drawn on the radar-screen-like representation of a globe that formed the background of the experiment.
Koichiro-san then went on to talk a little about the Art.Bit Exhibition in 2002, for which he acted as Curator for. The exhibition’s theme was “Art that can create Art”. The pieces he selected were extremely varied, some involving sound, some involving graphics. The popular internet vector toy Sodaplay was one of the pieces selected for this exhibition.
Koichiro-san decided to finish today’s seminar by talking about some of his ongoing, personal projects.
First up was qwikWeb. This new web service is an integration of mailing lists and “wiki” websites, sites that are maintained and edited by a whole community of users as opposed to just one or two webmasters. With qwikWeb, one can create a mailing list and post mail to it, which automatically creates articles and replies sorted by topic on a “wiki”-like website. Very clever and useful - any member of the mailing list has instant access to the entire history of the list, without having to go through and look at hundreds of individual mails in their email client.
This was an unnamed web application to show in graphical form when files have been updated, which is useful for quick project management.
Lastly, Koichiro-san shared with us a new software “toy” his company is developing. This was created because, as an avid Lego fan, one day he felt the urge to make a Lego model that could walk, with four legs. However when he sat down to do this he found that it was much harder than he had imagined. Cars and other moving objects with wheels were simple with Lego - walking “organisms” were not. So his company devised this software which allows users to create Lego-like models in a 3D shaded space and give them “life”, to make them walk around the screen.
It all looked very easy to do - you simply marked points of movement on the model you’ve created and click a button and it all starts moving - sometimes in quite a natural, smooth way and other times (depending on the quality of your model) in a bizarre, disjointed robotic way.
Thanks for a great seminar, Mr Koichiro! It has been very interesting to learn about your various art and programming projects.
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great projects, great person! i have to write about mr Koichiro on my website.
Posted by: kub on January 11th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
woow technology
Posted by: kurye on February 16th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Hey I think the gezfry website link is missing from this article, hehe here it is …
Posted by: bursa evden eve nakliyat on March 31st, 2009 at 3:34 am
If you could talk to your PC, what would you tell it?
Or anything else you’d like to add?
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Very nice idea. I like it. Cool car.
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