Pursuit and Expression of Japanese Beauty Using Technology

We have been working on the creation of media art, utilizing technologies. In this paper, we have focused on media art created based on the visualization of fluid behaviors. This area is named “fluid dynamics” and there has been a variety of research in this area. However, most of the visualization results of the fluid dynamics show only stable fluid behaviors and a lack of unstable or, in other words, unpredictable behaviors that would be significant in the creation of art. To create various unstable or unpredictable fluid behaviors, we have developed and introduced several new methods to control fluid behaviors and created two media arts called “Sound of Ikebana” and “Genesis”. Interestingly, people find and feel that there is Japanese beauty in these media arts, although they are created based on a natural phenomenon. This paper proposes the basic concept of media art based on the visualization of fluid dynamics and describes details of the methods that were developed by us to create unpredictable fluid dynamics-based phenomena. Also, we will discuss the relationship between Japanese beauty and physical phenomena represented by fluid dynamics.