Luck in a Sickroom with Dice
Designer
Ikuo Yamamoto
Country
Japan
category
Conceptual & Fine Art
Prize
Official Selection 2026
Short Description
A sense of being part of a chain of cosmic chance.
For me, genuine experience does not emerge from control or optimization.
It arises from encounters with what refuses to be fully controlled.
Thoughts are constantly updating, while experiences and preferences are unconsciously absorbed and layered over time.
They form a fragmented collage — like assembling magazine clippings, passages from novels, and impressions of films into a scrapbook.
This process is both an act of internalization and a way of observing myself from a slight distance.
Within these images, memories of cities, accumulated histories, and cultural residues dissolve into visual noise.
The boundary between the urban environment and the human body becomes unstable.
Figures are no longer separated from their surroundings, but gradually merge into them as one of many layers.
What appears is not a specific place or a fixed time.
It is a sensation —
something that feels strangely familiar,
yet has never been seen before.
That is what I am searching for.
Prompt Logic
Rather than following a fixed prompt structure, I work through iterative adjustments and associations.
I combine urban fragments, human figures, and environmental elements, allowing inconsistencies, noise, and visual interference to remain rather than correcting them.
The process prioritizes atmosphere, spatial tension, and memory-like ambiguity over narrative clarity or realism.
Prompts function as loose triggers rather than instructions — a way to invite images to surface, not to control their outcome.
What matters is not precision, but resonance.
Process
My process begins with prompts, but it does not end with control.
I treat generation as a space where intention, chance, and accumulated visual memory collide.
Urban landscapes, historical fragments, and human figures gradually lose their boundaries, forming layered images that feel both distant and intimate.
I do not search for a predefined result.
I wait for the moment when an image reveals something I did not consciously intend, yet somehow recognize.
That recognition becomes the signal to stop.