Daito Manabe is an artist known for exploring the complex relationship between humans and machines.

Pixel Opacity, Manabe's latest work, draws inspiration from the vast amounts of video data captured throughout the city. Using AI to automatically analyze these recordings, the piece transforms and morphs scenes of buildings and natural elements based on the activities it detects.

The inspiration for this concept comes from the countless cameras present in modern cities. While footage shot by locals, tourists, or governments floods our society, most of it remains unused. Typically, only a small portion of this vast footage is considered important.  However, it is fascinating that computers and AI process a massive volume of this footage on a daily basis.  Through this work, Manabe presents a new perspective and reveals what is in these footages. He challenges us to think about the untapped potential of this immense volume of footage and to explore more creative and intriguing uses beyond mere observation.

Manabe’s works, which range into a variety of fields, takes a new approach to everyday materials and phenomena. However, his end goal is not simply rich, high-definition realism by recognizing and recombining these familiar elemental building blocks. Rather, his practice is informed by careful observation to discover and elucidate the essential potentialities inherent to the human body, data, programming, computers, and other phenomena, thus probing the interrelationships and boundaries delineating the analog and digital, real and virtual.