Growing up between the Roman grid of the lower town and the medieval tangle of the high city imprinted a specific realization: architecture dictates behavior. A straight road implies order and commerce; a winding alley implies defense and secrecy. I realized early on that a maze is not merely a puzzle—it is a machine designed to control the flow of human movement.
As my practice evolved, I began to map these unseen control structures. This inquiry manifested in the Derelict/Black series—a set of large-scale acrylic works imagining the sprawling, dystopian mazes of a decaying metropolis.
Viewed from an orbital perspective, a city ceases to be a habitat and reveals itself as a circuit board (or a meta living organism, depending on your preferences). These paintings were my attempt to visualize that processor—a labyrinth designed not to hide a Minotaur, but to process human data. They depict a future where forgotten societies wander through the ruins of their own progress, trapped in the loop of a "Derelict" sector.
For years, I worked within the graphic constraints of the Mazes series. These were binary, calculated works. I felt a limitation. The geometry was sound, the atmosphere was there, but I needed to look for something different.
The evolution began when the lines and circles present inside my mazes started to mutate into something more architectural, resembling alien cities emerging from a void. The influence of H.P. Lovecraft became undeniable: I wasn't just drawing mazes; I wanted to map the Dyer Expedition, render the geometry of Arkham, and the massive, forbidden libraries of the Yithians. I needed a medium that could capture that specific sense of "dread" and "memory"—something tactile, immediate, visual and glitchy.
In an era of digital infinite reproduction, the Polaroid is an anomaly. It is a unique physical object that develops in your hand—a chemical memory of a specific photon collision. It has a dreamlike, ethereal presence that digital sensors cannot replicate. This made it the perfect substrate for the Instant X series.
The concept was to force a collision between two realities. I took the "Base Layer"—a snapshot of the real world (Tokyo streets, mundane objects)—and I manually overwrote it. Using Posca pens, I would draw directly onto the film, superimposing my "alien structures" over the developed image.
This was a Manual Stratigraphy. Just as my mind overlays Cyberpunk aesthetics onto Roman ruins, my hand overlaid xeno-architecture onto chemical film.
The resulting images are not just mixed-media art; they act as "proof" of an alternate dimension bleeding into ours. The blending of the tangible photo with the graphic ink creates a sense of unease—a visual confirmation that the structure of reality is porous.
For a long time, these artifacts remained archived in boxes, classified as "Unsorted Data." I struggled with their categorization. I struggled with their commercialization.
But I realized recently that they are Transmissions. Within the Arkhorin lore, if the 3D-printed contaiment units are the physical Hardware, then the Instant X series could represent Signals. From distant galaxies and thus different eras. As a result, they became linked to the Holostatic Core narrative: presented as holographic renderings of distant radio waves or corrupted video data from lost worlds —blurry, haunting transmissions stored alongside the physical relics of the Arkhorin.
