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Gallery Entry

Kamogawa Equidistance: War of Boundaries

By Toichiro Tanaka · JP

Kamogawa Equidistance: War of Boundaries (鴨川等感覚 境界戦) is a participatory narrative artwork set in Kyoto, Japan. It developed as a 24-episode story through relationships among human creators, generative AI, fictional characters, and the real urban landscape of Kyoto. Sixteen participating creators contributed original characters. Rather than treating these characters as fixed illustrations, I placed them into a shared fictional world and developed their encounters, conflicts, and relationships through an iterative process of writing, dialogue, selection, rejection, and rewriting with generative AI. The work moves between fiction and physical place. Real locations in Kyoto, including the Kamogawa River, shrines, bridges, streets, and other cultural sites, became part of the narrative. A digital map connects the fictional events to these actual locations, allowing readers to move from the story back into the city. The project is based on the idea of Relationship-Generating Art (RGA), developed through AI Art Gallery REST in Osaka. RGA proposes that an artwork is not only its final image or text. The processes of generation, selection, rejection, exhibition, viewing, conversation, and sharing, and the relationships created through them, can also form part of the artwork. In Kamogawa Equidistance, these relationships include human-to-human, human-to-AI, creator-to-character, reality-to-fiction, artwork-to-city, and individual-to-community. AI was therefore not used simply to automate authorship. It became one participant inside a larger relational system. Human participants supplied characters and intentions; AI generated possibilities; I selected, rejected, rewrote, connected, and directed those possibilities into a coherent 24-episode work. The completed project now exists across serialized fiction, character artworks, a location map, downloadable PDF editions, and a short film. The story has ended, but the relationships generated through it continue. The story may end, but the relationships continue.

Category
CONCEPTS MIXED MEDIA
Approved
26 September 2026