Ryoichi Kurokawa’s work is centered around trying to bring out two concepts: synesthesia and deconstruction of nature. This is very evident in most of Kurokawa’s work – watching ad/ab Atom on fullscreen is an astronomically more fulfilling experience than having it play on a different tab. The structures used, images, colors and the flow of Kurokawa’s work exhibit the sense of randomness that we see in nature, its almost as if Kurokawa holds the reins to this randomness as his pieces don’t necessarily succumb to entropy but hold a meaningful flow. 

For example in ad/ab Atom, Kurokawa’s starts off with the microscopic particles and then descends into smaller and smaller scales into subatomic particles. This can be visually seen as the particle patterns get more and more chaotic and sometimes wave like but stays controlled when visually presented. We also hear the main audio backbone for the piece getting more and more sharper and more intentional compositions being presented.

What intrigues me most about Kurokawa’s work is the control of the flow to explore the themes that he has in mind. Using nature and the environment around you is very hard to control and express motifs. Kurokawa himself states he intentionally does this when he calls his work time design. Field recordings themselves have proven to be unpredictable in nature, laying graphics on top of these and animation help Kurokawa to control what the viewer experiences, in my opinion in most of his work, be it a visual representing a snake shedding skin or a highway or even a goldfish, we are looking a metaphysical (like chaos) or conversely a material (like an atom) artifact in different viewpoints or lenses. Kurokawa’s work demonstrates how flow can be used as a tool for artistic expression in a audio-visual piece.