<Nashiki's Note 004>
Over the years, we have always had access to the latest technology available at the time and benefited from it. Artistic expression is no exception; technology has constantly provided us with new tools, and new forms of media have emerged to stimulate our inspiration and creativity. With new brushes, paper, paints, musical instruments, cameras, recording devices, digital instruments, audio/video equipment, or sound/image editing software, our expression, accordingly, has gained a new way to manifest itself. Each time we come across a new form of expression, the more novel and innovative it is, the more an artist from that era experiences the essentiality of "artistic expression."
Love songs from over a thousand years ago, haiku poems composed hundreds of years ago, folk songs from an unknown era, anonymous folk art pieces, obscure paintings, sculptures, and music from foreign lands.
These works still touch our hearts, transcending time and space since we genuinely embrace the existence of a "heart" within them - they truly lived, worried, struggled, rejoiced, sorrowed, even expressing all these emotions at once. And they move us because our "heart" resonates with "life," oscillating furiously yet beautifully between screams and silences.
Even if statistics or databases draw desirable characteristics, models to live by, good tendencies, or adapted heartfelt moments, they would be mere references at the very best. Or, even if current technology's efficient mechanisms generated these "works of art" by themselves, this would only amount to an entertaining pastime. Our "heart" cannot resonate with a story of romance written by someone who has never fallen in love with anybody or a war story told by someone who has never grieved.
No matter how much information is available firsthand, each person has to live in their own time and space, which presents itself as a unique, individualistic experience. The mind and body continuously pass from second to second, hour to hour, and each "heart" manifests a unique "life." And so, "artistic expression" arises only in the realm of embodying a "life" that is individual, unprecedented, and inimitable. A "work of art" is created not by statistics and computation but by the "experience" of one's inherent heart inextricably involved with it.
Yoshinari Nashiki (Music Production Advisor)
