#31 July 6, 2020

I talked with the cultural critic Hiroki Azuma for the first time in six years on the Niconico Live talk show. We were joined by the architect Ryuji Fujimura, and had a three-man talk about how we thought things would be after the Coronavirus pandemic subsides, using my book “Point and Line to Plane” as the starting point.

One interesting comment made by Hiroki Azuma consisted of him stating, “You say in your book ‘Point and Line to Plane’ that you want to dismantle things, but I think that in essence you are ‘An architect of lines’”. Hiroki Azuma thinks that the internet and computer are fundamentally lines which connect things with other things, and that is the essence of the age in which we live. Although the screen that you look at may appear to be a screen, it is in actuality a collection of lines that are connected behind the screen.

When this concept of lines is further expanded, I realized that the methods that we use to connect things and places with the lines called information is in essence the drawing lines around the world.

This can be considered to be the opposite of the methods used during the 20th century when the main objective was securing an adequate amount of volume in the world.

The other interesting thing pointed out by Hiroki Azuma as being a symbolic behavior in present times is the statements made by Trump on Twitter.

In spite of his privileged position as the President of the United States, Trump uses the flat communication platform called Twitter. The pavilion for KKAA may also be Twitter. At times, KKAA uses means that are smaller than a pavilion to disseminate information. We have explained that the methods that we have used up until now to proceed in parallel with small things and large things is similar to adopting the literary theory of Haruki Murakami and going back and forth between short stories and novels as the means necessary to increase creativity. However, in the realm of the style of hierarchy espoused by Hiroki Azuma, I get the feeling that this can be used to explain the adoption of flat methods of communication like SNS.