"New Imagery" Participants

ABSTRACT
It was an ironical coincidence of history that the energy report on 100% renewable energy by 2050, announced by WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) on February 3, 2011, was followed by natural disasters and man-made catastrophes in Japan. In July of the same year, a paper on the simulation of supplying renewable energy at the symposium of WWF Japan was presented by Haruki Tsuchiya, one of two founding members of CTG, the Computer Technique Group, a student collective investigated art and computer during the late 1960s. As Itsuo Sakane recollected in his book written in 1984, many Japanese artists turned their back to technology in the 1970s partly because of energy crisis caused by oil shocks and pollution-related illnesses. Since the oil shock of the year 1973, Tsuchiya has devoted himself in energy analysis, environmental studies as well as computer science. This paper will briefly introduce Haruki Tsuchiya’s story of CTG, the development of electronic book in 1989, on which he gained a hint from brainstorming at casual gatherings with former-CTG members and finally his lifelong research on energy. This little-known story of a pioneer in the history of media art, science and technology has great implications for ‘future visions of art within the convergence of information and energy technologies’, one of the themes of Renew 2013.