Distance to the Intangible
Today is June 30, 2026. Half of this year has already flown by in the blink of an eye. Just as spring finally arrived and it began to warm up, July is already just around the corner. Before I know it, I am standing at the halfway point of the year. While my days feel like a constant rush of being chased by something, strangely enough, when I look back, I sometimes can’t quite remember what it was that was pursuing me. With so many new things I wanted to take on this year, my photography has come to a standstill.
When I think about the state of my mind, various tasks interrupt my day, fragmenting my consciousness into small pieces as I handle them. On days spent facing the computer for long hours, a slight misalignment arises between the sensation of looking at the monitor and that of viewing the actual landscape, leaving me with a faint sense of dissonance. This very sensation becomes the contour of my daily life and the actual feeling of having lived through it. It carries a slightly uncomfortable edge.
With the emergence of AI, the time I spend at the computer has increased this year. How should I coexist with AI? I am still in the trial-and-error phase, but now that I have begun to grasp its current state bit by bit, July might be the right time to reduce my hours in front of the screen and step outside more often.
The time to contemplate the things I’ve made or the photographs I’ve taken always arrives with a slight delay. First, my hands move to create something or press the shutter. Only later do I set aside time to gather the fragments of my thoughts, gradually coming to understand what it was I had been thinking and feeling. Reaching that understanding takes a fair amount of time.
When I take a photograph, the sensation is incredibly ambiguous. Yet, looking back at the images after some time has passed, I feel as though the sensations and thoughts I had in that exact moment are captured just as they were. The reality of my existence and my thoughts overlap, becoming recorded together. Though it appears as if I am documenting a subject or a landscape, perhaps what is truly being recorded is the trace of my own existence.
I feel as though I spent the first half of this year continuously measuring my distance to the intangible. It has felt like searching for new possibilities—something akin to a seed, or a central axis. Looking forward to watching these elements grow over the remaining six months, I will continue to move forward with my work tomorrow and beyond.