“Shunsuke Takawo was born in Kumamoto in 1981, the second son of three brothers. His mother’s hobby was patchwork quilting.

He went on to study comparative culture at the University of Tsukuba’s Faculty of Comparative Culture in the second academic group, where he studied photographic production and theory. During his studies, he was influenced by Bernd/Hella Becher’s typology, Sigmar Polke’s obsession with texture and Wolfgang Tillmans’ installations and collective compositions.

In 2006, he enrolled at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), where he studied photography and film. At the time, social networking sites such as Tumblr and Twitter were in their infancy, and the experience of continuously browsing digital images on a timeline was fresh. Among his works from this period were a video work created from a large number of digital photographs of pylons, power lines and rivers, and an installation work (《Processing Photography Blink Series》) that used eye-detection technology to control the images by making the viewer blink. It was also around this time that he was influenced by hip-hop culture and became interested in the relationship between local communities and culture.

After working for a web production company, she started working as an assistant at the Centre for Art Information at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010. She has been exposed to matters related to new media such as creative coding, physical computing (electronic construction) and digital fabrication. Organised the Takawo Cup IT Pun Contest (https://togetter.com/li/169334) to break through the blockage of social networking after the Great East Japan Earthquake, which received 6,210 entries. In this context, he became aware of alternative venues of expression and community-based activities, mainly on the web, from the existing field of art.

In 2012, he joined O’Reilly Japan, where he was in charge of event management and web production for Maker Faire-related projects; in 2014, he returned to the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) to become a research fellow and started creative coding around 2015. He continued to write code every day, but at this point he did not publish anything in particular, and although his growth was slow, he developed the habit of ‘hands on before thinking’ within himself.

Since 2017, she has been a lecturer at Konan Women’s University, teaching coding to literature students who are not specializing in art or programming.

Shunsuke Takawo is firstly a writer of sequences (repetitions). This can be seen from the fact that while at university he was influenced by Becher’s typology (where a motif, such as a water tower, is decided upon and a large number of variations are shown), and while at IAMAS he created a work that generated video from a large number of still images. He also nurtured a huge aggregate from a large number of tweets in the takawo Cup IT Pun Contest.

Second, Takawo is an artist obsessed with colour and texture. His sensitivity to detailed colours and textures was nurtured by his study of photography during the analogue-digital transitional period. He was also influenced by his VJ activities as a filmmaker.

Thirdly, Takawo is an artist who is active in fostering community: he has been involved in the management of Maker Faire and has worked to build the foundations of a co-creation culture, and in the activities of Generative Masks, it was his intention from the start to build community around his work.

Fourth, Takawo is an advocate of ‘daily coding’. Rather than programming in a purpose- or result-oriented manner, he practices the idea of discovering and finding small new things in life, as if he were making miso soup every day.

Currently, Takawo is Creative coder/Associate professor, Department of Media Expression, Faculty of Letters, Konan Women’s University/Representative director of the Generative Art Promotion Foundation”