is a Japanese

interactive media Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video and audio. Since its early conception, various f ...

and installation artist who has also created a number of commercial

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This feedba ...

s. In addition he has worked in television, music performance, museum design and digital musical instrument design.

Education and early work

Iwai was born in 1962 in

Kira, Aichi was a town located in Hazu District, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. As of May 1, 2004, the town had an estimated population of 22,280 and a population density of 619.2 persons per km2. Its total area was 35.98 km2. Kira was a coastal settle ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

. As a child, he spent time creating

flip book A flip book, flipbook, flicker book, or kineograph is a booklet with a series of images that very gradually change from one page to the next, so that when the pages are viewed in quick succession, the images appear to animate by simulating moti ...

-style animations in the corner of text books and making motor-driven mechanical toys, since these were the only technologies available to him.Multimedia Content Association of Japan Multimedia Grand Prix'97 Winner's Profile
Retrieved July 29, 2006 In 1981 Iwai matriculated in the Fine Arts Department at the

University of Tsukuba is a public university, public research university located in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Ibaraki, Japan. It is a top 10 Designated National University, and was ranked Type A by the Japanese government as part of the Top Global University Pro ...

, studying Plastic Art and Mixed Media.Toshio Iwai Profile by Unknown User at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Interactive Telecommunications Program
Retrieved July 29, 2006 Influenced by the work of

Norman McLaren William Norman McLaren, LL. D. (11 April 1914 – 27 January 1987) was a Scottish Canadian animator, director and producer known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB).Rosenthal, Alan. ''The new documentary in action: a caseb ...

,A Short History of the Works by Toshio Iwai: Transcript from Doors Conference (1993)
Retrieved July 29, 2006 he began producing

installation art Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called ...

that combined pre-cinema

animation Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most ani ...

techniques (the

phenakistoscope The phenakistiscope (also known by the spellings phénakisticope or phenakistoscope) was the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion. Dubbed and ('stroboscopic discs') by its inventors, it has been known unde ...

and the

zoetrope A zoetrope is one of several pre-film animation devices that produce the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs showing progressive phases of that motion. It was basically a cylindrical variation of the phénak ...

) with modern methods of image capture and creation (

photocopiers A photocopier (also called copier or copy machine, and formerly Xerox machine, the generic trademark) is a machine that makes copies of documents and other visual images onto paper or plastic film quickly and cheaply. Most modern photocopiers ...

, video cameras and

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

) and of stroboscopic lighting (

video monitors A display device is an output device for presentation of information in visual or tactile form (the latter used for example in tactile electronic displays for blind people). When the input information that is supplied has an electrical signal th ...

video projectors A video projector is an image projector that receives a video signal and projects the corresponding image on a projection screen using a lens system. Video projectors use a very bright ultra-high-performance lamp (a special mercury arc lamp), X ...

and

LEDs A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits light when current flows through it. Electrons in the semiconductor recombine with electron holes, releasing energy in the form of photons. The color of the light (cor ...

).Animation World Magazine: Pre-Cinema Toys Inspire Multimedia Artist Iwai
by Deanna Morse (February, 1999) Retrieved July 29, 2006 His 1985 installation ''Time Stratum'' won the Gold prize at the High Technology Art Exhibition '85, held in Shibuya Seibu, Tokyo. ''Time Stratum II'' was awarded the Grand Prize at the 17th Contemporary Japanese Art Exhibition, Meguro Art Museum, Tokyo. In 1987 Iwai graduated from the University of Tsukuba with a master's degree in Plastic Art and Mixed Media. In the same year, Iwai designed his first published videogame, ''

Otocky is a video game released in 1987 for the Family Computer Disk System in Japan.

'', in association with

ASCII Corporation was a Japanese publishing company based in Chiyoda, Tokyo. It became a subsidiary of Kadokawa Group Holdings in 2004, and merged with another Kadokawa subsidiary MediaWorks on April 1, 2008, becoming ASCII Media Works. The company published ' ...

. In 1991-92 Iwai was an Artist-in-Residence at the

Exploratorium The Exploratorium is a museum of science, technology, and arts in San Francisco, California. Characterized as "a mad scientist's penny arcade, a scientific funhouse, and an experimental laboratory all rolled into one", the participatory natu ...

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

, California, where he created two exhibits that are now part of the museum's permanent collection, ''Well of Lights'' (1992) and ''Music Insects'' (1992). ''Music Insects'' became the foundation for his unpublished video game '' Sound Fantasy''. This period of work culminated in ''Another Time, Another Space'' (1993), an interactive installation devised for

Antwerp Antwerp (; nl, Antwerpen ; french: Anvers ; es, Amberes) is the largest city in Belgium by area at and the capital of Antwerp Province in the Flemish Region. With a population of 520,504,

Centraal Station, Belgium. The installation used 15 video cameras to capture live images of visitors to the station; 30 computers manipulated the video feeds output to 30 video monitors in real-time, introducing visual effects such as time-lapse delays, slow-motion effects and time compression.

Later installation work

From 1994 to 1995 Iwai was an Artist-in-Residence at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in

Karlsruhe Karlsruhe ( , , ; South Franconian: ''Kallsruh'') is the third-largest city of the German state (''Land'') of Baden-Württemberg after its capital of Stuttgart and Mannheim, and the 22nd-largest city in the nation, with 308,436 inhabitants. ...

, Germany. Around this time his work became increasingly focused on the relationship between sound and image, using

interactivity Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but mo ...

gestural interface Gesture recognition is a topic in computer science and language technology with the goal of interpreting human gestures via mathematical algorithms. It is a subdiscipline of computer vision. Gestures can originate from any bodily motion or state ...

and

generative Generative may refer to: * Generative actor, a person who instigates social change * Generative art, art that has been created using an autonomous system that is frequently, but not necessarily, implemented using a computer * Generative music, mus ...

interactive Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but mo ...

and aleatoric music. These interests are expressed in three key installation works, ''Resonance of 4'', ''Piano - As Image Media'' and ''Composition on the Table''. ''Resonance of 4'' (1994) is a collaborative music-creation artwork consisting of four adjacent stations, each comprising a small podium bearing a computer mouse, a 16-by-16 grid projected onto the floor from a video projector above, and a cursor connected to the mouse. Dots can be placed in each of the grid's cells by clicking with the mouse. A synchronized bar sweeps across all the grids simultaneously, triggering musical notes wherever a dot has been placed. Sound is relayed over a loudspeaker system, and the notes from all four stations are superimposed, although each station has its own musical tone. This work was shown at the ''Serious Games'' exhibition at the

Laing Art Gallery The Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, is located on New Bridge Street West. The gallery was designed in the Baroque style with Art Nouveau elements by architects Cackett & Burns Dick and is now a Grade II listed building. It ...

, Newcastle in 1996 and 1997 and at the

Barbican Arts Centre The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London and the largest of its kind in Europe. The centre hosts classical and contemporary music concerts, theatre performances, film screenings and art exhib ...

, London in 1997.''Resonance of 4'' Overview and Image at berylgraham.com
Retrieved July 29, 2006 In ''Piano - As Image Media'' (1995), audience members operate a trackball to draw lighted dots on a grid projected onto a sheet of fabric that leads to the keyboard of a small

grand piano The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keybo ...

. The dots move towards the piano keyboard, and as they come close to it they accelerate and strike a key. The piano, controlled by a computer, plays the note corresponding to the 'struck' key, and at the same time a computer-generated graphical figure appears on another sheet of fabric suspended above the piano, appearing to fly out of the piano and up into the air.''Piano - As Image Media'' description at New York Digital Salon website
Retrieved July 29, 2006 This work, along with ''Composition on the Table'', was shown in the Play Zone at the

Millennium Dome The Millennium Dome was the original name of the large dome-shaped building on the Greenwich Peninsula in South East London, England, which housed a major exhibition celebrating the beginning of the third millennium. As of 2022, it is the ni ...

in London, 1999–2000.Home Page for Papers, International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence 2002
Retrieved July 30, 2006 It was also one of the works used in Iwai's performance collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, ''Music Plays Images x Images Play Music''.ARS Electronica Archive: Prix Ars Electronica 1997 - Music Plays Images X Images Play Music (1997)
Retrieved July 30, 2006 ''Composition on the Table'' (1998/99) comprises four white tables bearing physical interface components: switches, dials, and turntables. Computer graphics images are projected onto the tables from ceiling-mounted video projectors, and loudspeakers are present. As the audience manipulates the interface elements, graphical and audio changes take place in a way that is intimately connected to the audience's input. The objective of this work was to create a mixed reality environment where multiple participants could create visuals and music together.''Composition on the Table'' Overview at ICC Online
Retrieved July 29, 2006 Elements of this work are recognizable in Iwai's

Nintendo DS The is a handheld game console produced by Nintendo, released globally across 2004 and 2005. The DS, an initialism for "Developers' System" or "Dual Screen", introduced distinctive new features to handheld games: two LCD screens working in t ...

videogame

Electroplankton is an interactive music video game developed by indieszero and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo DS handheld video game console. It was first released in Japan in 2005, and was later released in North America and Europe in 2006. This game ...

. The piece was presented as part of the Art Gallery at

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia ...

'99, Los Angeles.''Composition on the Table'' at SIGGRAPH'99
Retrieved July 29, 2006 From 1996 to 1998 Iwai was the first Artist in Residence at IAMAS in

Ōgaki Ōgaki Castle is a city located in Gifu, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 161,539, and a population density of 782 persons per km2 in 65,931 households. The total area of the city was . Ōgaki was the final destination for the h ...

, Japan. In 1997 he had a major retrospective exhibition at the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo. From 1998 to 2001 he was Artist in Residence at Mixed Reality Systems Laboratory in

Yokohama is the second-largest city in Japan by population and the most populous municipality of Japan. It is the capital city and the most populous city in Kanagawa Prefecture, with a 2020 population of 3.8 million. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of T ...

, Japan.

Video games

Iwai is the first internationally recognized gallery artist also to have led the creation of several successful commercial video game projects. This cross-disciplinary ability typifies Iwai's career.Wired 5.05: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek (May 1997)
Retrieved July 29, 2006 Iwai's first game was the musical

shoot 'em up Shoot 'em ups (also known as shmups or STGs ) are a sub-genre of action games. There is no consensus as to which design elements compose a shoot 'em up; some restrict the definition to games featuring spacecraft and certain types of charac ...

Otocky is a video game released in 1987 for the Family Computer Disk System in Japan.

'' (1987), produced in association with

for the

Famicom Disk System The commonly shortened to the Famicom Disk System or just Disk System, is a peripheral for Nintendo's Family Computer home video game console, released only in Japan on February 21, 1986. It uses proprietary floppy disks called "Disk Cards" for ...

, an add-on for the NES available only in Japan.siliconera.com: Otocky by Katie Montminy
Retrieved July 30, 2006 The game is notable for being the first to include ''creative/procedural'' generative music. Through association with different

game mechanics In tabletop games and video games, game mechanics are the rules or ludemes that govern and guide the player's actions, as well as the game's response to them. A rule is an instruction on how to play, a ludeme is an element of play like the L-sh ...

and player actions, the game plays quantized-in-time

musical notes In music, a note is the representation of a musical sound. Notes can represent the pitch and duration of a sound in musical notation. A note can also represent a pitch class. Notes are the building blocks of much written music: discretization ...

in a variety of digitally synthesized voices. ''Otocky'' is a precursor of Rez, Tetsuya Mizuguchi's 2002

Dreamcast The is a home video game console released by Sega on November 27, 1998, in Japan; September 9, 1999, in North America; and October 14, 1999, in Europe. It was the first sixth-generation video game console, preceding Sony's PlayStation 2, Nint ...

and

PlayStation 2 The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on 4 March 2000, in North America on 26 October 2000, in Europe on 24 November 2000, and in Australia on ...

game exploring similar themes of player action and musical evolution.handcircus.com: Ode to “Otocky” (by Toshio Iwai) (July 26, 2006)
Retrieved July 30, 2006 Later, leveraging work done on the 1993 installation art project ''Music Insects'' at San Francisco's

, Iwai created another sound-based game in 1994 for the

Super Famicom The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), commonly shortened to Super NES or Super Nintendo, is a Fourth generation of video game consoles, 16-bit home video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in 1990 in Japan and South ...

system called '' Sound Fantasy''. In the game animated insects traverse a grid containing colored dots. As the insects pass over the dots, musical scales, sounds, and graphical effects are triggered. The player can select colors from a palette and paint on the grid, triggering new results and changing the insects' direction, improvising a

visual music Visual music, sometimes called colour music, refers to the creation of a visual analogue to musical form by adapting musical structures for visual composition, which can also include silent films or silent Lumia work. It also refers to methods o ...

performance.Toshio Iwai keynote at Futuresonic on Pixelsumo.com (July 20, 2006)
Retrieved July 30, 2006 However, the game's release was cancelled and it was eventually converted into the PC title '' SimTunes'', published by

Maxis Maxis is an American video game developer and a division of Electronic Arts (EA). The studio was founded in 1987 by Will Wright and Jeff Braun, and acquired by EA in 1997. Maxis is best known for its simulation games, including '' The Sims ...

, a division of

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the ...

.Wired 5.04: Bug Jam - SimTunes Review (April 1997)
Retrieved July 30, 2006 In 2000, Iwai worked to publish , a collaborative drawing game that became the

's first mouse-compatible title. This was followed in 2001 by the limited-edition release of a simple step sequencer, , for the

WonderSwan The (ワンダースワン) is a handheld game console released in Japan by Bandai. It was developed by Gunpei Yokoi's company Koto Laboratory and Bandai, and was the last piece of hardware Yokoi developed before his death in 1997. Released i ...

. This

non-game Non-games are a class of software on the border between video games and toys. The term "non-game game" was coined by late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who describes it as "a form of entertainment that really doesn't have a winner, or eve ...

would be the precursor to the more advanced 2005 version released together with Yamaha.Gutierrez, Verena and Vincente.
Tenori-on: The Light Of Sound
'. PingMag. 18 April 2008. Iwai's acclaimed ''

'' for the

was released in Japan in 2005 and in Europe and North America in 2006.Gamespot: Electroplankton for Nintendo DS
Retrieved July 30, 2006 A suite of ten different interactive music and audio toys themed around cartoon

plankton Plankton are the diverse collection of organisms found in water (or air) that are unable to propel themselves against a current (or wind). The individual organisms constituting plankton are called plankters. In the ocean, they provide a cruc ...

and using the novel

touchscreen A touchscreen or touch screen is the assembly of both an input ('touch panel') and output ('display') device. The touch panel is normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. The display is ofte ...

and

microphone A microphone, colloquially called a mic or mike (), is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and publ ...

interface features of the Nintendo DS, ''Electroplankton'' draws heavily on Iwai's earlier work, including ''Composition on the Table''.Gamespot: Electroplankton Review
Retrieved July 30, 2006

Games designed by Toshio Iwai

*''

Otocky is a video game released in 1987 for the Family Computer Disk System in Japan.

'' (1987;

) *'' Sound Fantasy'' (canceled;

) *'' SimTunes'' (1996, PC) * (2000,

) * (2001,

) *''

'' (2005,

)

Television

In 1990 Iwai's solo show ''Machine for Trinity'' exhibited at the

Laforet Museum is a department store, residence, and museum complex located in the Harajuku commercial and entertainment district of the Shibuya neighborhood, in Tokyo, Japan. Constructed over part of the old Tokyo Central Church, a newer church located behin ...

in Tokyo; some of the works shown there demonstrated that

could be generated and combined in real-time with

live action Live action (or live-action) is a form of cinematography or videography that uses photography instead of animation. Some works combine live-action with animation to create a live-action animated film. Live-action is used to define film, video ...

images. The TV director Shinji Fukuhara visited the exhibition and shortly afterward contracted Iwai to create concepts and a virtual set for a weekly half-hour science news show ''Einstein TV'' (

Fuji TV JOCX-DTV (channel 8), branded as and colloquially known as CX, is a Japanese television station based in Odaiba, Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Owned and operated by the it is the key station of the Fuji News Network (FNN) and the Fuji Network S ...

, 1990–91). Created on the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore International, Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and sign ...

, the virtual set included

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

-like pop-up menus. This led to more work with Fuji TV the following year in the development of the daily interactive children's show '' Ugo Ugo Lhuga'' (1992–94).Artandculture.com Artist Profile
Retrieved July 29, 2006 Influenced by ''

Pee-wee's Playhouse ''Pee-wee's Playhouse'' is an American television series starring Paul Reubens as the childlike Pee-wee Herman that ran from 1986 to 1990 on Saturday mornings on CBS, and airing in reruns until July 1991. The show was developed from Reubens's po ...

'', which Iwai had seen during his tenure at the

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

, the show was imaginative and irreverent and featured talking TVs, a tomato that gave advice to call-in guests, a robot named Robot that asked riddles and broke down when given silly answers,

anthropomorphic Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology. Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics t ...

faeces Feces ( or faeces), known colloquially and in slang as poo and poop, are the solid or semi-solid remains of food that was not digested in the small intestine, and has been broken down by bacteria in the large intestine. Feces contain a relati ...

named Professor Poo Poo, and a cubo-surrealist artist named Surr. ''Ugo Ugo Lhuga'' is 'go-go girls' anagrammed in Japanese. A central concept of the show was that two

live-action Live action (or live-action) is a form of cinematography or videography that uses photography instead of animation. Some works combine live-action with animation to create a live-action animated film. Live-action is used to define film, video ...

main characters would appear to interact with the sets and characters of a

virtual world A virtual world (also called a virtual space) is a computer-simulated environment which may be populated by many users who can create a personal avatar, and simultaneously and independently explore the virtual world, participate in its activities ...

. Instead of generating the virtual characters first and orchestrating the actions of the live-action cast to fit

pre-rendered Pre-rendering is the process in which video footage is not rendered in real-time by the hardware that is outputting or playing back the video. Instead, the video is a recording of footage that was previously rendered on different equipment (typic ...

imagery, the characters were generated and composited in real-time with minimal

post-production Post-production is part of the process of filmmaking, video production, audio production, and photography. Post-production includes all stages of production occurring after principal photography or recording individual program segments. Th ...

. At first the shows were pre-recorded, but after the first six months cast and crew were confident enough to perform

live Live may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''Live!'' (2007 film), 2007 American film * ''Live'' (2014 film), a 2014 Japanese film *'' ''Live'' (Apocalyptica DVD) Music * Live (band), American alternative rock band * List of album ...

. To enhance the live-broadcast appeal of the show, Iwai helped devise a call-in

sumo is a form of competitive full-contact wrestling where a '' rikishi'' (wrestler) attempts to force his opponent out of a circular ring ('' dohyō'') or into touching the ground with any body part other than the soles of his feet (usually by t ...

match. Children from across Japan sent in drawings of sumo wrestlers on postcards, which Iwai scanned. During the program the audience called in and, watching their televisions at home, shouted into the telephone; the louder they shouted the stronger their sumo wrestler became, finally pushing the opposing wrestler out of the

dohyō A ''dohyō'' (, ) is the space in which a sumo wrestling bout occurs. A typical ''dohyō'' is a circle made of partially buried rice-straw bales 4.55 meters in diameter. In official professional tournaments (''honbasho''), it is mounted on a squa ...

Performances and public lectures

In 1996 and 1997 Iwai collaborated with musician and composer

Ryuichi Sakamoto is a Japanese composer, pianist, singer, record producer and actor who has pursued a diverse range of styles as a solo artist and as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). With his bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto i ...

to create the multimedia stage performance ''Music Plays Images x Images Play Music''. The performance included use of Iwai's installation ''Piano - As Image Media'' and a version of ''Resonance of 4'' adapted to use a

chessboard A chessboard is a used to play chess. It consists of 64 squares, 8 rows by 8 columns, on which the chess pieces are placed. It is square in shape and uses two colours of squares, one light and one dark, in a chequered pattern. During play, the bo ...

-like interface. In June 2004 Iwai gave a prestigious invited public lecture at the 4th International Conference on

New Interfaces for Musical Expression New Interfaces for Musical Expression, also known as NIME, is an international conference dedicated to scientific research on the development of new technologies and their role in musical expression and artistic performance. History The confe ...

, held in

Hamamatsu is a city located in western Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. the city had an estimated population of 791,707 in 340,591 households, making it the prefecture's largest city, and a population density of . The total area of the site was . Overview H ...

, Japan.New Interfaces for Musical Expression 2004 Website
Retrieved July 30, 2006

Museum design

Created during his time as an Artist-in-Residence at the

, California, Iwai's works ''Well of Lights'' (1992)Exploratorium Website: Past Art Projects
Retrieved July 30, 2006 and ''Music Insects'' (1992) are part of the Exploratorium's permanent collection. Iwai contributed to the construction of the ''Bouncing Totoro'' 3-dimensional zoetrope at the

Ghibli Museum The is a museum showcasing the work of the Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli. It is located in Inokashira Park in Mitaka, a western city of Tokyo, Japan. The museum combines features of a children's museum, technology museum, and a fine ...

in Mitaka, Tokyo. He helped conceive an LED strobe device to be used in place of conventional strobe lights, softening the lighting as a result. He also made a layout plan for the positioning of the figures using a computer."Ghibli Museum Special" at GhibliWorld.com
Retrieved July 25, 2006

Digital musical instrument design

A current project of Iwai's, in collaboration with

Yamaha Corporation is a Japanese multinational corporation and conglomerate with a very wide range of products and services. It is one of the constituents of Nikkei 225 and is the world's largest musical instrument manufacturing company. The former motorcycle divi ...

, is the creation of a new interactive digital musical instrument. Called '' Tenori-on'', the instrument is a sixteen-by-sixteen array of illuminated LED switches which can be activated in a variety of ways to create a changing musical

soundscape A soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived by humans, in context. The term was originally coined by Michael Southworth, and popularised by R. Murray Schafer. There is a varied history of the use of soundscape depending on discipline, ...

.we-make-money-not-art.com TENORI-ON: Playing Light and Sound (July 23, 2005)
Retrieved July 30, 2006 ''Tenori-on'' was showcased throughout its development through stage and conference performances.we-make-money-not-art.com Toshio Iwai performance at Sonar (June 23, 2006)
Retrieved July 30, 2006 It went on sale in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...

on 4 September 2007.TENORI-ON official UK website (September 4, 2007)
Retrieved September 7, 2007

Influences and connections

Thomas Wilfred Thomas Wilfred (June 18, 1889 in Naestved, Denmark - August 15, 1968 in Nyack, New York), born Richard Edgar Løvstrøm, was a musician and inventor. He is best known for his light art, which he named '' lumia'', and his designs for color organ ...

's Lumia *

Visual music Visual music, sometimes called colour music, refers to the creation of a visual analogue to musical form by adapting musical structures for visual composition, which can also include silent films or silent Lumia work. It also refers to methods o ...

Color organ The term color organ refers to a tradition of mechanical devices built to represent sound and accompany music in a visual medium. The earliest created color organs were manual instruments based on the harpsichord design. By the 1900s they were ele ...

Mary Hallock-Greenewalt Mary Elizabeth Hallock-Greenewalt (Sept. 8, 1871 – Nov. 27, 1950)Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, Death Certificates, 1906-1963 atabase on-line Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014. Original data: Pennsylvania (State). Death certific ...

Oskar Fischinger Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger (June 22, 1900 – January 31, 1967) was a German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter, notable for creating abstract musical animation many decades before the appearance of computer graphics and music vid ...

* Aleatoric music * Generative music **

Brian Eno Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (; born Brian Peter George Eno, 15 May 1948) is a British musician, composer, record producer and visual artist best known for his contributions to ambient music and work in rock, pop a ...

Interactive music In video games, adaptive music (also called dynamic or interactive music) is background music whose volume, rhythm or tune changes in response to specific events in the game. History Adaptive music was first used in the video game '' Frogger'' b ...

Conway's game of life The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no furthe ...

Pong ''Pong'' is a table tennis–themed twitch arcade sports video game, featuring simple two-dimensional graphics, manufactured by Atari and originally released in 1972. It was one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Al ...

* Open-ended Gameplay ** Will Wright

Quotes

"I've been longing for the feeling of my childhood in the digital world and that is why I've been sticking to relations among media, machine(s), and people through interactive works." "All of his work is sincere, and all consists of equal doses of seriousness and play, pathos and humor, intricacy and simplicity." - Azby Brown

Notable works

Installations *''Time Stratum IV'' 1990 *''Another Time, Another Space NHK version'' 1994 *''Resonance of 4'' 1994 *''Piano - As Image Media'' 1995 *''Composition on the Table'' 1998/99 *''Shanghai World Financial Center, Observation Deck'' 2008 Permanent Exhibits *''Well of Lights'' Exploratorium, 1992 *''Music Insects'' Exploratorium, 1992 *''Another Time, Another Space'', National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (now the

National Media Museum The National Science and Media Museum (formerly The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, 1983–2006 and then the National Media Museum, 2006–2017), located in Bradford, West Yorkshire, is part of the national Science Museum G ...

), Bradford, UK 1999 Videogames *''

Otocky is a video game released in 1987 for the Family Computer Disk System in Japan.

'' 1986 *'' SimTunes'' 1996 *''

'' 2005 Television *''Einstein TV'' 1990-91 *'' Ugo Ugo Lhuga'' 1992-94 Performance *''Music Plays Images x Images Play Music'' 1996-97 Digital Musical Instrument Design *'' Tenori-on'' Books, magazines and printed matters *''Artist, Designer and Director SCAN'' (Rikuyosha, 2000) *''100 Floors House'' (Kaiseisha, 2008) *''Docchiga!? Books'' (Books KInokuniya, 2006) Others *''Docchi Ga Hen? poster ( Tokyu Railways, 2007–2008)

References

External links

Yamaha Tenori-on Official Website
*
Insects and pianos: Toshio Iwai's talk at Futuresonic (July 20, 2006) on samurai.fm
{{DEFAULTSORT:Iwai, Toshio Japanese video artists Japanese artists Japanese male composers Japanese composers Japanese male musicians Japanese video game designers Video game composers 1962 births Living people University of Tsukuba alumni Artists from Aichi Prefecture Musicians from Aichi Prefecture Gesture recognition