is a Japanese interactive media and installation artist who has also created a number of commercial video games. In addition he has worked in television, music performance, museum design and digital musical instrument design.
Education and early work
Iwai was born in 1962 in Kira, Aichi, Japan. As a child, he spent time creating flip book-style animations in the corner of text books and making motor-driven mechanical toys, since these were the only technologies available to him. In 1981 Iwai matriculated in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Tsukuba, studying Plastic Art and Mixed Media. Influenced by the work of Norman McLaren, he began producing installation art that combined pre-cinema animation techniques (the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope) with modern methods of image capture and creation (photocopiers, video cameras and computer graphics) and of stroboscopic lighting (video monitors, video projectors and LEDs). His 1985 installation Time Stratum won the Gold prize at the High Technology Art Exhibition '85, held in Shibuya Seibu, Tokyo. Time Stratum II was awarded the Grand Prize at the 17th Contemporary Japanese Art Exhibition, Meguro Art Museum, Tokyo. In 1987 Iwai graduated from the University of Tsukuba with a master's degree in Plastic Art and Mixed Media. In the same year, Iwai designed his first published videogame, Otocky, in association with ASCII Corporation.
In 1991-92 Iwai was an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California, where he created two exhibits that are now part of the museum's permanent collection, Well of Lights (1992) and Music Insects (1992). Music Insects became the foundation for his unpublished video game Sound Fantasy.
This period of work culminated in Another Time, Another Space (1993), an interactive installation devised for Antwerp Centraal Station, Belgium. The installation used 15 video cameras to capture live images of visitors to the station; 30 computers manipulated the video feeds output to 30 video monitors in real-time, introducing visual effects such as time-lapse delays, slow-motion effects and time compression.
Later installation work
From 1994 to 1995 Iwai was an Artist-in-Residence at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Around this time his work became increasingly focused on the relationship between sound and image, using interactivity, gestural interface and generative, interactive and aleatoric music. These interests are expressed in three key installation works, Resonance of 4, Piano - As Image Media and Composition on the Table.
Resonance of 4 (1994) is a collaborative music-creation artwork consisting of four adjacent stations, each comprising a small podium bearing a computer mouse, a 16-by-16 grid projected onto the floor from a video projector above, and a cursor connected to the mouse. Dots can be placed in each of the grid's cells by clicking with the mouse. A synchronized bar sweeps across all the grids simultaneously, triggering musical notes wherever a dot has been placed. Sound is relayed over a loudspeaker system, and the notes from all four stations are superimposed, although each station has its own musical tone. This work was shown at the Serious Games exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle in 1996 and 1997 and at the Barbican Arts Centre, London in 1997.
In Piano - As Image Media (1995), audience members operate a trackball to draw lighted dots on a grid projected onto a sheet of fabric that leads to the keyboard of a small grand piano. The dots move towards the piano keyboard, and as they come close to it they accelerate and strike a key. The piano, controlled by a computer, plays the note corresponding to the 'struck' key, and at the same time, a computer-generated graphical figure appears on another sheet of fabric suspended above the piano, appearing to fly out of the piano and up into the air. This work, along with Composition on the Table, was shown in the Play Zone at the Millennium Dome in London, 1999–2000. It was also one of the works used in Iwai's performance collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Music Plays Images x Images Play Music.