Ikuo Yamamoto is a Tokyo-based director and AI-driven visual artist working at the intersection of moving image, generative systems, and experimental storytelling. A graduate of Tama Art University (Department of Graphic Design), he developed his foundation in cinematic language and visual communication before expanding into computational and machine-based processes. This dual grounding shapes a practice that balances formal precision with openness to emergence.
MY PROCESS
Yamamoto treats technology not as a tool for optimisation, but as a creative partner. His works often evolve through generative structures that introduce variation, interruption, and instability, allowing images to drift beyond fixed intention.
Within this shifting space between authorship and autonomy, he explores how meaning can arise when control is partially relinquished. Rather than asserting dominance over the system, he invites unpredictability, cultivating moments where friction and accident become generative forces.
Memory quietly underpins his visual language. His narratives evoke sensations that feel intimate yet unplaceable, like fragments of a dream or echoes of a past that never fully existed. Through layered textures, temporal shifts, and subtle distortions, he constructs atmospheres suspended between the familiar and the unknown. Viewers are not directed toward a singular interpretation, but toward an experience of recognition tinged with uncertainty.
At the core of Yamamoto’s philosophy is a belief in coincidence and contingency. He sees creativity as emerging from encounters with what resists control, and he deliberately leaves space for error, drift, and surprise.
By embracing unpredictability, his work reveals the poetic tension between intention and chance, suggesting that authenticity lies not in mastery alone, but in openness to the unforeseen.
