Yugo Nakamura, YUGOP

Forget web design as pretty pictures — for Yugo Nakamura, the online experience will reach its full potential only when it can be integrated seamlessly into our lives. "I'd like my work to be a filter that lets the interesting parts of the new media environments — the computers and the people who are involved — become more alive," Nakamura says. With this intent, Nakamura designs sites that force users to reconsider the limits of the online environment. To accomplish this, he utilizes the simple mathematics underlying natural complexity to create online interactions that are useable and familiar because their behavior is modeled on the natural world.
Photo: Thong Van

Nakamura's commissioned site for The Museum of Modern Art's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit functions as a kind of virtual stroll through the show's works. The uniform textual listings and randomly appearing imagery invite a casual exploration of the exhibit, and the color-coded tagging system provides yet another means of wandering. The site breaks down the exhibit's walls as only the web can, providing an experience that is both completely different from and just as stunning as Paola Antonelli's bricks-and-mortar exhibit.

In "Entropy," Nakamura explores the concept of complexity. Interested in how complex entities can arise from a number of basic connections, Nakamura designed an online project that displays an ever-growing series of elliptical shapes that join together to form a type of virtual creature. The project is interactive, allowing users to change the course of the animation with a click of the mouse in ways that are sometimes predictable and sometimes surprising. For Nakamura, this split between the predictable and the unpredictable echoes what he sees outside the machine. "I have always been interested in expressing this — to extract the essence of human behavior and bring together the logical and illogical."

x hide sponsorship