Biography
Yuma Yanagisawa is a Japanese media artist based in Berlin whose practice explores real-time generative systems, immersive installations, and the intersection of nature, time-based systems, and perception. His work focuses on the poetic potential of computation, creating ephemeral environments shaped by algorithmic processes.
His works have been presented internationally at Ars Electronica, MUTEK Tokyo, and NODE20 at Mousonturm (Frankfurt), and have been licensed by CODE – Centre of Digital Experiences (Veszprém, Hungary). Yanagisawa has also created commissioned projects for Cartier, La Mer, and Shiseido.
Statement
My practice is grounded in Computational Ephemerality: an artistic framework that redirects attention from the apparent continuity of a computational system toward the finite existence of the individual entities within it.
Generative systems are often presented through their capacity for infinite production. Perfect loops, continuous simulations, and endlessly generated images encourage us to perceive computation as an uninterrupted flow. My work shifts the observer’s focus from this persistent macrostructure to the microscopic lifecycles of its constituent particles, establishing a core thesis: particle as life.
Viewed from a distance, millions of computational entities may appear to form a stable current, landscape, or organism. At a smaller scale, however, this continuity is revealed as a succession of appearances and disappearances. The system may persist, but each individual existence within it is temporary.
I construct real-time generative environments in which particles emerge, interact, transform, and eventually cease to exist. Their disappearance is not a technical by-product of memory deallocation; it is an algorithmic release into the digital void. By engineering limits, endings, and irreversible changes into systems, I explore how computation, when resonant with our perception, can express fleeting beauty.
This approach draws upon the Japanese sensibility of hakanasa: an awareness of the fragility and transience of existence. I do not use this idea to reproduce a traditional visual language. Instead, I consider how it might operate within contemporary computational culture, where digitality is frequently seen as infinite, instant, and immortal.
Through moving image, generative composition, and immersive installation, I propose a form of digital naturalism ordered by the principle of the particle as life. In this framework, artificial entities are understood as temporal beings. Their value arises not from their capacity to persist forever, but from the fact that each appearance is singular and must eventually end.