Four-room participatory installation exploring information metabolism through voice, AI, and urban research. Fragments of interviews collected from residents across Ibaraki City are listened to, read, recombined, planted, translated into data, and returned to the space through AI-generated reports, creating an evolving system in which information continuously circulates and transforms.
Just as soil transforms decay into nutrients for new growth, information takes form, accumulates, is excavated, recomposed, and circulated as nourishment for future emergence.
Gardens of Becoming
December 4 – December 21, 2025
Venue: Fukushi Bunka Kaikan (Oak Theater), 3F, Ibaraki City, Osaka, Japan
Organised by: Ibaraki Cultural Promotion Foundation (Public Interest Incorporated Foundation)
Supported by: Ibaraki Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Ibaraki Tourism Association
Grant: Japan Foundation for Regional Art-Activities(JAFRA), Kao Foundation for Arts and Sciences
Commissioned by Hub-Ibaraki Art Project, Osaka/Ibaraki
Curated by : Chie Uchida (Hub-Ibaraki Art Project Director, Art7ten)
Artist: Noriko Okaku
Programming & System Development: Sotaro Kido
Programming & System Development: Sotaro Kido
Photo by Nahako Kato
Gardens of Becoming Diagram
Seed Chamber A (Dormant)
A chamber where information exists as dormant seeds. Fragments of voices collected in Ibaraki are inscribed onto paper roses and distributed to visitors at the entrance.
Seed Chamber B (Fermenting)
A chamber of accumulation and fermentation. Interviews with residents are presented as overlapping layers of voices and text. Here, “Ibaraki City” emerges not as a fixed image, but as a constellation of relationships.
Analog Room
A chamber of recombination and planting. Visitors may plant fragments of voices in the flowerbed or create new text collages from fragments left by others. Through intuition, chance, and interpretation, new relationships are generated.
Digital Room
A chamber of translation and reflection. The positions of roses planted in the flowerbed are converted into data and visualised as a digital garden. AI continuously observes these transformations and generates reports that are fed back into the installation, making processes of circulation and transformation perceptible.
The Power to Generate Difference:
A Manifesto on Information Metabolism
Welcome.
Awaken from the age of reason and efficiency— an era that believed the world was fixed and solid.
What lies before you now are merely fragments of such a hardened world.
What lies before you now are merely fragments of such a hardened world.
The artificial flowers in this room are the work of human hands, an attempt to imitate nature.
They are copyable, uniform information — but contain no life.
And beside them lie the memories and records of this land, layered like geological strata, yet equally copyable, uniform information: fossils.
They are copyable, uniform information — but contain no life.
And beside them lie the memories and records of this land, layered like geological strata, yet equally copyable, uniform information: fossils.
But life does not remain still.
When read through the lens of relationality, dormant seeds bloom.
When read through the lens of relationality, dormant seeds bloom.
The philosopher Gregory Bateson once said: information is “a difference that makes a difference.”
Digital systems pursue efficiency and simplify the world into sameness.
Yet the systems emerging here hunger for your perspective—your difference.
Within this circulation, AI is powered by human action, and humans are inspired by AI.
To live is to be aware of the patterns of connection, to continuously generate new differences.
When you welcome AI not merely as a tool but as a partner in dialogue, you resist homogenisation and discover the power to generate difference.
When you welcome AI not merely as a tool but as a partner in dialogue, you resist homogenisation and discover the power to generate difference.
Your choice—the position where you place the rose—shapes the experience of the next visitor, alters the AI’s perception, and injects a new viewpoint into the circulatory system.
This also means you are conversing across time—with those who came before and with future generations yet unseen.
This also means you are conversing across time—with those who came before and with future generations yet unseen.
Contribute your power to this metabolism of information.
04.12.2025
Noriko Okaku
Throughout the exhibition, the artist visits the installation daily, observing the relationships, transformations, and signs of emergence that unfold within the space, and records them in an ongoing observation diary.
