My practice focuses on the production of installation works using digital media, in which I reinterpret the Buddhist concept of shogyō mujō—the impermanence of all phenomena—and the law of entropy as issues of media temporality and the structural assumptions underlying storage and reproduction. The irreversible processes of change and degradation implied by impermanence are not limited to biological life; they also act upon media themselves, which mediate images and information. In contemporary digital environments, however, these processes of degradation are rendered largely invisible through the backgrounding of energy supply and computational resources. As a result, media come to function as if they were liberated from temporal constraints.
In response to this condition, my work primarily aims to critically examine how the notion of “permanent media” is constructed. Digital images circulate under assumptions of preservation, reproducibility, and durability by being detached from material supports and sustained through quasi-infinite supplies of energy and computational power. While this structure represents an extreme development of modern conceptions of media, it simultaneously embeds an ideology that excludes temporal elements such as decay and disappearance. I regard this as a critical issue within contemporary digital media environments.
As a theoretical framework, I draw on Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the analogon. Sartre’s distinction between the image as an object and the image as a representation can be understood as further expanded in digital contexts. Digital images are no longer fixed to specific material substrates; instead, they appear as temporary phenomena constituted through chains of infrastructure, including devices, networks, and electrical power. Accordingly, my work places greater emphasis on visualizing the instability of the conditions under which images come into being, rather than on presenting completed images as such.
Within the exhibition space, I adopt structures in which visitors’ bodily actions transform digital images through media apparatuses. The constellation of images that emerges is not conceived as a finished work intended for preservation or repeated playback. Rather, it is generated as a temporary phenomenon dependent on action and duration. Consequently, the images remain subject to transformation through viewer intervention, environmental conditions, and the passage of time, always retaining the possibility of disappearance. Through this structure, I deliberately destabilize qualities often regarded as inherent to digital media—such as storage and reproducibility—and redefine digital images as entities that encompass processes of generation, change, and disappearance.
In this context, digital media no longer appear as immutable carriers of information, but as media endowed with a form of corporeality—dependent on time and energy, and therefore susceptible to degradation. Viewers, in turn, come to perceive themselves not only as subjects who observe images, but also as components of the media circuit that generates and transforms them. As a result, binary frameworks such as subject and object, or artwork and audience, are relativized, and the exhibition space as a whole is constituted as a temporary media environment. Ultimately, the viewers’ own bodies are also repositioned—like digital images—within the flows of time and energy.
From this perspective, my practice can be understood as an attempt to reconsider digital images not as immaterial and neutral information, but as phenomena accompanied by temporality, energy, and corporeality. By foregrounding the inevitable processes of decay and disappearance that also act upon media, my work seeks to critically dismantle the myth of permanence that underlies contemporary digital technology.
Works Cited
Chaplin, Adrienne Dengerink. “Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.” The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. Third Ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes. Oxon: Routledge, 2013. 126-136. Print.
