Life Forms of Colors Digital Art by Yuko Suzuki is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2025 Silver A' Design Award in Generative, Algorithmic, Parametric and AI-Assisted Design Competition Category.
SilverGenerative· 2025
Life Forms of Colors Digital Art
by Yuko Suzuki
Client: Civic Creative Base Tokyo (CCBT)
Silver A' Design Award Winner in Generative Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #170854The Design
About Life Forms of Colors Digital Art
This work is an animation that visually depicts the process of pixels being broken down and reconstructed. The idea for the work began when the artist, a printmaker, wanted to create a landscape print and wondered if he could achieve color separation through coding. The pixels appear like cells, moving to form new shapes and colors, embodying the Japanese concepts of Kasane (layering) and Zurashi (shifting). They also symbolize the various transformations a person can undergo, expressing diversity and fluidity throughout the work, and reflecting the intersection of tradition and technology.
The Recognition
About the Silver A' Design Award
Life Forms of Colors Digital Art is a Silver A' Design Award winner, an extraordinarily prestigious recognition granted to top-of-the-line, gorgeous, and impressive designs. Silver winners are tremendously brilliant and exceedingly creative works that illustrate the outstanding expertise, talent, and acuity of their designers. Life Forms of Colors Digital Art is expected to be a wonderful, showpiece work that is remarkably professional and profoundly innovative. This Silver A' Design Award-winning design is a highly notable, admired invention that benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Life Forms of Colors Digital Art is a vastly envied creation that evokes desires, introduces positive feelings, and sparks amazement and wonderment.
Where to Get It
Generative Art and Digital Installation Services
We create bespoke generative art and digital installations that bridge traditional printmaking with code. Our work transforms pixels into living forms, bringing poetic motion to screens and spaces. Winner of the prestigious A' Design Award, we collaborate with galleries, cultural institutions, and forward-thinking brands.
Contact UsInterviews
Grand Interview
Your innovative approach to color separation through coding in Life Forms of Colors Digital Art beautifully bridges traditional printmaking with digital art - could you elaborate on how this intersection influenced your creative decisions throughout the development process?
For me, traditional woodblock printing has never been just a technique, but a way of seeing and thinking about the world.In this project, I reinterpreted the process of printmaking through code, breaking down the visual element of color into pixels and reconstructing it into new forms.Working with code allowed me to approach color in a more structural and systematic way. What had previously existed only as a conceptual or intuitive idea became something tangible through the act of computation and execution.
The pixels in Life Forms of Colors Digital Art appear to embody both microscopic cellular movements and macroscopic human dynamics - what inspired you to explore this dual symbolism, and how does it reflect your perspective on the relationship between technology and nature?
Through the process of coding, I came to feel that nature and technology are not fundamentally opposed, but are deeply connected at their core. Pixels, while being the smallest units of digital technology, can behave like living cells or organisms. As I depicted the way these pixels gather, move, and transform, I began to see overlaps with human relationships in life — families, schools, workplaces, even nations. It seemed to quietly suggest that all things in the world, regardless of scale, share common structures and rhythms.The relationship between nature and technology is not a simple dichotomy of control and submission, or artificial and natural, but rather something more like co-evolution. I believe we always live on the shifting boundary between the two.In this work, I aimed to express that ambiguity and layering through the movement of pixels and the changes in their structure.
The Japanese concepts of Kasane and Zurashi play a vital role in Life Forms of Colors Digital Art - could you explain how these traditional principles guided your programming approach and shaped the final visual narrative?
In traditional woodblock printing, the concept of Kasane—the layering of colors one by one through repeated printing—allows for the emergence of unexpected textures and subtle traces of the human hand. Over time, these individual layers merge to form a single image that can no longer be separated into its components. I sought to reimagine this idea of Kasane in a three-dimensional digital space, believing that by maintaining its core structure while changing the medium, a new form of painterly expression could emerge.The principle of Zurashi, or intentional shifting, is expressed not through static misalignment but through subtle changes in time and space—variations in animation timing, or slight shifts in angle and viewpoint within a digital environment. These small displacements create rhythm, fluctuation, and a quiet sense of life.By translating Kasane and Zurashi into the languages of space, time, and code, I explore a mode of expression that connects my printmaking sensibility with my technical curiosity, while also reflecting the fluid ambiguity at the heart of Japanese aesthetics.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- This animation breaks down an image into pixels, reconstructing and transforming them repeatedly. The pixels emerge like cells, moving and forming new shapes and colors, embodying the Japanese concepts of "Kasane (layering)" and "Zurashi (shifting)." This reflects how living beings shape the world, either by choice or by following the flow. The ever-changing forms symbolize human transformation and the cycle of life and death.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- LED screen 4m × 4m, 10 minutes 30 seconds
- Tags
- Generative Art, Coding
- Production Technology
- This work was created entirely in a programming language called Processing.
It is made up of multiple animations that change from one shape to the next, linked together. - Design Challenge
- The most difficult and exciting part was figuring out how to connect all of the different shapes through coding.
It was impossible to create all of the animations in one document, so I divided the whole thing into four scenes, created the animation, and connected them using video editing software. - Research
- This design research explores an animation technique that uses coding to break down and reconstruct pixels.
Through this process, the artist began to feel as if the pixels symbolized the workings of humans and the world. The pixels are like cells, but at the same time, they also seem like the individual people that make up the world. This created a sense of moving between the micro and macro worlds.
Through the use of digital technology, this research offers new methods of visual expression in art, business and society, and suggests the possibility of redefining cultural value. - Inspiration
- The impetus for creating this work began when the artist, a printmaker, wanted to create a landscape print, and wondered whether it would be possible to achieve color separation through coding. This was the beginning of an attempt to incorporate the physical acts of producing a multi-color woodblock print - "color separation of the print," "overprinting, " and "rolling the paper" - into code, and it developed into the more abstract idea of "creating a three-dimensional print."
- Project Duration
- This work was exhibited as part of the CCBT x Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions 2024 "Poems in Code: Generative Art Today and Programming Generated Moving Image" project held in Tokyo in February 2024.
- Operation Flow
- This work is an animation that depicts the process of pixels being broken down and reconstructed. As you watch, the pixels move and transform, creating new shapes. The changes in the pixels symbolize the potential for people to transform in various ways, and this diversity and fluidity is expressed throughout the work.
- Image Credits
- Image #1: Photographer Ryuichi Maruo, Life-forms of colors, 2024, Photo courtesy Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT].
Image #2: Photographer Ryuichi Maruo, Life-forms of colors, 2024, Photo courtesy Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT].
Video Credits: Photographer Ryuichi Maruo, Life-forms of colors, 2024, Video courtesy Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT].
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