Can we use the same technology that speeds up society to create experiences that slow us down and calm the mind?

You can find a Dutch version of the page here.

The work what I show when I show data about Haruki Murakami transforms the stories by the Japanese author into a series of animations and illustrations. They imagine what the ideas behind the novels could look like in Haruki Murakami’s mind.

The animations are made with the same types of data and technology that contribute to the fast-paced contemporary society, but offer an alternative application for them: they calm the mind of a viewer and prepare it to start reading a novel.

Each novel is translated into a data illustration and animation. The animations are silent and slow. They visualize both the ideation process for a new story in the mind of Haruki Murakami and his intuitive writing process that follows.

The series currently includes the following novels:

Click the links to view that novel’s data illustration, animation and background information.

If this is your first time here, read the background information below.

Prints

Would like like to put one of these on your wall? I make prints on request. Interested? Reach out to me here.

Background information

After reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls, I felt a growing urge to create a visual tribute to the book. I enjoyed the story a lot. I started exploring ways to use a simple data set (page numbers per chapter) and data visualisation – a method that translates information into images – to create an interesting image. I worked on the idea intuitively and created several images until I experienced a click with one of the images.

The image that clicked with me visualizes the rhythm of the novel. Each chapter gets a pair of simplified Japanese sliding doors – shoji. These doors open based on the chapter length. The collection of doors forms the illustration of the story.

Not long after I made my first illustration, I decided to make an animated version. The animation is inspired by Murakami in two ways. First, a grid with doors appears, but the doors are all closed. The grid is the idea of the novel as it forms inside his mind. (The order of the appearance of this grid is based on the way the protagonist in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World shuffles data in his head.) With the grid completed, the animation starts opening doors chapter by chapter, mimicking the way Haruki Murakami writes the first draft of a novel: intuitively, from start to finish, without thinking through each plot line.

I later added other novels the project. The main challenge here was finding new grids to put the chapters in. My first image was based on a book with 70 chapters and a nice 7 by 10 square grid. The other books don’t have a seven fold chapter count (obviously). After some tests, I decided to keep a 7-chapters-per-row layout for the other books. This way, the first book in the series influences the others. As none of the other books have a seven fold page count, I started playing with the placement of shoji shapes based on story elements. Besides the grid, I use the story to change the colors. All colors come from the book a dictionary of color combinations vol. 2. (You can read the way the books influence their visual on the specific book pages.)

Besides the novels I visualized, I used What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Novelist as a Vocation for research. I read the second book after a part of the series was made already and found some interesting similarities between Haruki Murakami’s writing and my work. For example, he wants to:

… open windows in the mind of the reader and blow fresh air through them.

It’s not a stretch to view the shapes in the illustrations as windows.

The project uses the Dutch editions for data.

For the extra curious reader: I’ve written a few blog posts about my Haruki Murakami series. They include a making of with test illustrations and notes on exhibitions.