AKASAKA Motion Heritage
As part of TBS's Akasaka Entertainment City Initiative, we recorded the dance of Akasaka geisha Akasaka Ikuko through volumetric capture and produced an interactive digital art piece displayed on station signage in front of Akasaka Station, reacting to pedestrian flow in real time.
Presented during the Tokyo Creative Salon (TCS), the piece treats Akasaka Ikuko as a living cultural heritage. Rather than capturing her likeness, we stripped the photorealism from the volumetric-capture data entirely, leaving only the abstract essence of her movement visible on screen: trajectory, speed, and the shifting of her center of gravity.
Passersby don't interact with the piece on purpose. They simply walk past the signage at Akasaka Station, and their movements are picked up, stretched and amplified as though pulled into Ikuko's dance. When a train arrives and foot traffic surges, the artwork's landscape shifts with it. The result is a single living scene where a geisha's decades-old gestures and the everyday rhythm of commuters merge into one.
