In 2012, the French Institute in Tokyo organized the first edition of Digital Month, a festival designed to highlight French creativity in the fields of digital cultures and new images. This event reached a wide and diverse audience by presenting all aspects of digital creation, from contemporary art to moving images, architecture to video games, and also digital publishing, contemporary music and performing arts. After the success of this first 2012 edition, the French Institute of Japan reiterates the digital experience by organizing Digital Choc, the second edition of this festival, in February 2013.

Through the theme of "digital territories," the 2013 edition would like to explore areas that digital technologies has disrupted, influenced or revolutionized. Artworks proposed in this digital arts festival are to be presented in several cities in the French cultural network in Japan (5 institutes IFJ, 4 French Alliances), and partners (concert halls, shops, cinemas, galleries, etc.)

Colombian artist Paolo Almario shares how he started working with specific technologies within his digital arts practice. His early web development interests have evolved into physical self-destroying portraits. On behalf of a not-so-frustrating learning process, he promotes SCANLabs, a students group dedicated to digital technologies 'evangelization'.

Jessica Garcia Fritz believes that architectural history is a cornerstone in architectural education, and teaches her students to utilize the basic structure of vaults used in naves of Gothic Cathedrals. They use a software platform called Rhino for digital simulation and merge the Gothic world into our digital world. 

As the digital life is moving faster than our physical life, Biying Mao and her company Hot Pop Factory has started using digital means to disrupt the physical design process. Rather than designing form, they are using computational design to design rules and parameters, similar to computer programming. 

Joleza Koka - Political Activism in the Digital Age

"It's not enough to have a good idea. To realize that good idea is very difficult, and that's what I work hard to do".

In Realizing Good Ideas from PechaKucha Night Buffalo Vol. 14, Chris Siano shares how he uses digital design and fabricatio to make things better, whether it is a public art installation, a student sculpture project, a building or a neighborhood. For the past twelve years he has served as an Instructional Support Technician in the University at Buffalo Department of Art. In 2005 he formed The Foundry Group Inc. - a company specializing in art and architectural fabrication. And in 2012, in partnership with his brother Matthew, he formed HES Properties - a real estate development company focusing on development of mixed-use properties on Buffalo's West Side. All of these endevours are conduits for great ideas in his community to come to fruition. 

Cover image: Fabricated by Chris Siano and The Foundry Group, Inc., 2015 for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery: Jene Highstein's Black Mound (Turtle).

This was "PechaKucha of the Day" on Thursday, January 7th, 2016.

"The work becomes a conversation about class, race, gender and appropriation."

In Building Afrotopia from PechaKucha Buffalo Vol. 16, artist Stacey Robinson illustrates how speculating black futures became paramount in his artistic practice as a response to the global displacement of Black and Indigenous people. Robinson shares recent work, beginning with his current Pan-African flag series, representing nations where Black and Indigenous populations are controlled by extreme measures. Robinson then shares works from an in-progress book, 100 Afrofuturists Practitioners, depicting people building future spaces where Black peace exists using S.T.E.A.M (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art(s), and Math). Lastly, Robinson presents works inspired by the past Black Renaissance speculative Black Futures, with Afrofuturist digital collages inspired by Romare Bearden, James Denmark, Manzel Bowman, and other past and contemporary mixed media collage artists. 

"A wall and a column...what they have in common is an interest in looking at the cultural agency of traditional building materials and their ability to speak."

In A Wall and A Column: 2 Projects from PechaKucha Buffalo Vol. 16, architect and University at Buffalo Peter Reyner Banham Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor Ang Li presents a pair of site specific installations that explore the cultural agency of vernacular building materials. Horror Vacui is an installation in Lisbon, Portugal that examines the ability of building facades to “speak” through the medium of the Portuguese “azulejo” - hand-painted ceramic tiles often depicting scenes from historic or civic events. The piece explores the narrative potential of bricks and mortar within contemporary image sharing and crowdsourcing platforms. No Frills is an installation in Buffalo, New York that stems out of an interest in the industrialized production of terracotta in the 19th century as a new kind of ornamental language. In a semi-abandoned Chevrolet Factory by the architect Albert Kahn, a 13-foot column interrupts the existing grid of the assembly floor,  acting as a bridge between the vast scale of obsolete industry and the human scale of the architectural ornament.

建築家の秋吉浩気さんは、地方自治体と協働したプロジェクトを通してデジタルファブリケーションを用いた新しい建築のあり方を提示します。ダイナミックな作品の試行の数々は必見です。

Architect Koki Akiyoshi presents a new way of building merging traditional and digital fabrication. Through his numerous projects collaborating with local governments of various communities, we will be able to experience the dynamism of his unique design approach.