Sculpting Spacetime: Ryu Furusawa's New Work Passing and the Bodily Reconstruction of Media

Introduction: Movement and Stillness at the Threshold of Perception

Ryu Furusawa is a contemporary artist whose practice is grounded in a distinctive physical background as a surfer. Through computational manipulation and physical intervention, he has consistently dismantled and reconstructed the frameworks of established visual media—video, photography, and painting 1. His new work Passing, to be presented in his solo exhibition at NEORT++ in April 2026, takes as its source material the view from a train window: arguably the most universal "landscape of movement" for modern humanity 3. The work treats video data as a "temporal stratum"—a virtual three-dimensional volume—and, by freely manipulating its cross-sections, transforms the very experience of "passing through" time that we ordinarily take for granted 3.

At the core of Furusawa's practice lies a sustained inquiry into the "nearness" and "farness" of reality within the informational environment, a question deeply resonant with the transformation of bodily sense in network society after the pandemic 1. To understand Passing, we must trace historically how the train window—a quintessentially modern screen—reconfigured human perception, while analyzing in detail how Furusawa's own computational toolkit, imgtrans, elevates visual media into what might be called "sculpture in spacetime" 5. This essay takes the work's statement as its point of departure, and synthesizes Furusawa's past works, technical background, and media-theoretical and art-historical context to articulate the new horizon of perception his work proposes.

A Phenomenology of Movement: The Train Window and Motion Parallax

As the statement for Passing notes, when we gaze out from a train window, we unconsciously read depth from a "gradient of velocity" 3. This phenomenon is defined in psychology and perceptual science as motion parallax 7. As the observer moves, the apparent velocity of an object's image on the retina is inversely proportional to its distance. This biological mechanism is one of the most important depth cues, transforming two-dimensional visual information into a sense of three-dimensional space 7.

The Layered Structure of Perception under Motion Parallax

The structure of perception produced by motion parallax can be organized by distance, as in the table below:

Furusawa sharply points out that this "gradient of velocity" presupposes that observer and object share the same three-dimensional space, and that time flows in a single direction 3. The digital processing in Passing dismantles precisely this presupposition—the simultaneity of time—within a single frame. Normally, when a video camera's shutter is triggered, every pixel in the frame records the same instant. In Furusawa's work, however, the "time" referenced at the right and left edges of the image is deliberately offset. As a result, the perspectival space that would ordinarily converge toward a vanishing point gradually transforms into a space of parallel projection 3.

Railway Travel and the Industrialization of Perception: A Schivelbusch Perspective

The themes Furusawa engages in Passing can be read as a reinterpretation, through contemporary digital technology, of the shock the railroad delivered to human perception in the nineteenth century. In his classic study The Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues that the railroad—as a new mode of transportation—produced a decisively different mode of perception from that of the horse-drawn carriage: what he calls panoramic perception 10.

Panoramic Perception and the Annihilation of Space

The high speed of rail travel transformed the foreground into abstract "lines" and severed the intimate, tactile, bodily relationship the traveler had previously maintained with the landscape 11. What Schivelbusch called the "annihilation of space and time" induced a paradigm shift along the following axes:

1. The flattening of landscape: speed erased the detail of the foreground, and the landscape became a "pictorial surface" detached from the traveler's body 11.
2. The standardization of time: the development of rail networks unified the regionally fragmented local times into an abstract, uniform standard time 10.
3. The objectification of the body: travelers were transformed from subjects who walked the land on their own feet into passive entities carried inside a vast machine—described, in their own words, as "parcels" 12.

Furusawa's Passing pushes this "panoramicized" vision into a further dimension via the contemporary "machine ensemble" of the digital computer 14. While Schivelbusch addressed the "loss of information" caused by speed, Furusawa reconceives video data as a "volume with thickness," reinjecting heterogeneous temporal axes into the flattened landscape and quietly, structurally, dismantling the order of space and time 3.

The Geometry of the Space-Time Volume: Treating Video as Flesh

The most important technical foundation of Furusawa's practice is his treatment of video as a three-dimensional solid with a temporal axis—a Space-Time Volume or Video Cube 1. Conventional video playback is an extremely limited sampling process: it presents this solid one slice at a time, as cross-sections perpendicular to the temporal axis 2.

imgtrans: A Toolkit for Spatio-Temporal Manipulation

The Python library imgtrans, developed by Furusawa, makes it possible to slice this video volume at arbitrary angles 5.

• Stacking: by arraying successive video frames along the depth axis, a voxel volume with three axes—X (horizontal), Y (vertical), and T (time)—is formed 5.
• Maneuver Design: the trajectory ("maneuver") of the slicing plane through the volume is designed 5. This extracts "warped" temporal cross-sections that would never appear in ordinary playback.
• The plasticity of spacetime: the video volume is treated as a plastic mass of stored color information, sliceable from any angle 5.

This approach is a computational extension of the principle of the slit-scan 16. Slit-scan is a technique that fixes the passage of time as spatial distortion, but Furusawa uses it not as a mere visual effect but as a sculptural process for interrogating the very structure of the medium 2.

A Computational Model of the Process

Mathematically, what Furusawa performs is equivalent to defining a transformation function that maps space-time coordinates onto new coordinates 5.

Where V denotes the video volume, by linearly varying the time referenced as the spatial coordinates change—that is, by rotating the angle of the slicing plane—the "gradual transformation from perspective to parallel projection" seen in Passing is realized 3.

The Transformation of Projection: Liberation from the Vanishing Point and East Asian Space

The central claim in Passing's statement is "the transformation from a perspectival space converging on a vanishing point to a parallel projection without a vanishing point" 3. This signals a movement—simulated through digital processing—from the Western tradition of linear perspective to the East Asian pictorial tradition (and the contemporary engineering convention) of axonometric projection.

Differences in Spatial Cognition Between Projection Systems

The rotation of the slicing plane in Passing is an act of extracting a parallel-projective structure from imagery captured by the camera—an apparatus of perspective—by reading the temporal axis as a spatial axis 3. If linear perspective is a device that orders the world around the observer as its center, parallel projection dismantles that center and treats every location as equivalent 19. Furusawa describes this transformation as taking place "with the horizon as its medium," suggesting a dynamic spatial reorganization in which the seat of the vanishing point at the horizon rises vertically into a wall of time 4.

The Surfer's Gaze: Becoming One with a Flowing Landscape

Another crucial dimension of Furusawa's practice is that he is a surfer. Mid Tide #3 (2024), which received an Honorary Mention in the New Animation Art category of Prix Ars Electronica 2024, is a work in which this embodied experience comes to fruition 2.

The Wave as a Temporal Continuum

For Furusawa, the act of waiting for and riding waves is an exceptionally rare experience in which the standards of perception themselves are transformed. On the sea surface, the viewpoint is not fixed; the body merges with the flow of wave energy 2.

• Mid Tide #3: the work's source material is footage of waves crashing against rocks, recorded with a fixed camera over three and a half hours, captured at 4K and 120 fps 2. From the resulting stack of frames—the video volume—Furusawa cuts cross-sections along trajectories distinct from the ordinary temporal axis.
• Multiple temporalities: the work reconstructs within a single screen both extremely short temporal units—the shape of each droplet of spray, imperceptible to the human eye—and extremely long ones, the change of the tide 2.
• The character of waves: Furusawa notes that while immobile objects such as rocks are deformed by spatio-temporal manipulation, waves, being "continuous in both time and space," maintain their form even within the warped spacetime of the work 2. This continuity serves as a perceptual guideline for the viewer.

The moving landscape of the train in Passing belongs to the same trajectory: a reinterpretation of landscape as flowing continuum. The speed of the train and the speed of waves; the frame of the train window and the frame of the sea surface. Through the filter of digital processing, Furusawa translates embodied sensation across different velocity regimes into a more universal question about perception 2.

Collective Practice in "YOF" and the Materiality of Media

Since 2015, Ryu Furusawa has also worked as part of the artist collective YOF, alongside Takayoshi Ohara and Tomoyuki Yanagawa 26. YOF's practice is grounded in "pragmatic" (that is, applied or pre-linguistic) research into color and space in visual media, and it seeks to reconsider the contemporary condition of visual expression 26.

"2D Painting" and the Wavering of the Real

In YOF's signature project series 2D Painting, the viewer encounters a visual experience in which a planar field of color and the three-dimensional space behind it intersect, calling into question the very conditions under which reality is established 27.

• Virtualizing the real, realizing the virtual: virtual images are folded onto the physical pictorial plane, while real light and shadow are reprocessed as problems of digital resolution 27.
• The materiality of the image: video and digital images are treated not as mere projection surfaces for information but as matter with bodily texture. The phrase in Passing's statement—"giving the image thickness as a continuum of photographs"—is deeply connected to this thinking on the materialization of the image 3.

While Furusawa's solo practice focuses on the transformation of bodily sensation and spacetime, his work within YOF leans toward an analytical dismantling of the physical and institutional structures of media itself. The two practices are nonetheless complementary, sharing a single commitment: treating the very process by which images are fixed as raw material 6.

Conclusion: Liberation from the "Cross-Section" of Time

What runs through Passing and Furusawa's work as a whole is a vivid exposure of how the visual order we ordinarily receive as "reality" depends on specific technical parameters: linear perspective, single-directional time, the fixed viewpoint 2.

His works disassemble the data generated by the video camera—the "modern eye"—and reconstruct it into a higher-dimensional form, the space-time volume, which the human body cannot perceive directly. From this volume, he then extracts cross-sections of "a time that might have been otherwise," seeking to install new standards of perception into the viewer's body 2.

In Passing, when the vanishing point disappears and the gradient of velocity between near and far yields to a chain of parallel patterns, the everyday act of looking out a train window opens onto something almost cosmic: the thickness of time. This is to rewrite Schivelbusch's narrative of loss—the railway's "annihilation of space and time"—through the new medium of the digital, into a story of perceptual expansion and reconstruction.

The "passing" that Furusawa offers is no longer movement as a means to a destination. It is a perceptual journey of deep thought: how, within the quiet dismantling of the order of space and time, can we look at the singular, irreplaceable cross-section we call "here and now" from another angle.

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Appendix: Selected Works by Ryu Furusawa and Their Technical / Philosophical Characteristics

Across these works, Furusawa continues to bridge the abstract domain of the digital and the concrete embodied experience of surfing. In his hands, "time" and "space" cease to be mere physical quantities and become pliable, weighted material that constitutes the very reality of our lives 2.

References

1. Ryu Furusawa — ICC, https://www.ntticc.or.jp/ja/archive/participants/furusawa-ryu/
2. Mid Tide #3 — Prix Ars Electronica 2024, https://calls.ars.electronica.art/2024/prix/winners/13962/
3. Passing — artscape, https://artscape.jp/exhibitions/66367/
4. Ryu Furusawa "Passing" (NEORT++) — Tokyo Art Beat, https://www.tokyoartbeat.com/events/-/Ryu-Furusawa-Passing/neort/2026-04-17
5. RyuFurusawa/imgtrans: Spatio-temporal manipulation of video data — GitHub, imgtrans" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://github.com/RyuFurusawa/imgtrans
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7. Visually perceived depth from single-dot circular trajectories — PMC, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12717191/
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12. Panoramic Travel (Schivelbusch), https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl800/Schivelbusch.pdf
13. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, https://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/221758/18449447/1338242293590/Schivelbusch-
14. Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch's "The Railway Journey" — Madam Mayo, https://madam-mayo.com/notes-on-wolfgang-schivelbuschs-the-railway-journey-the-industrialization-of-time-and-space-in-the-nineteenth-century/
15. Video frames stacked together to form a volume — ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/deo-frames-are-stacked-together-to-form-a-volume-The-right-figure-shows-a-video-cube_fig4_221571804
16. A slit-scanning depth of route panorama from stationary blur — SciSpace, https://scispace.com/pdf/a-slit-scanning-depth-of-route-panorama-from-stationary-blur-1enjke9mtf.pdf
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19. Forms of Parallel Projection Drawing — Drawing Matter, https://drawingmatter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/DMJ_No2_SayanSkandarajah.pdf
20. Why the World Relies on a Chinese "Perspective" — Jan Krikke, Medium, https://jankrikke2020.medium.com/why-the-world-relies-on-a-chinese-perspective-cf3122caf67f
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24. 3D Projection — Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_projection
25. "ICC Annual 2024: A Very Close Distance" Artist Interview: Ryu Furusawa — YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiB6NUJG84U
26. YOF — Tokyo Arts and Space, https://www.tokyoartsandspace.jp/creator/index/Y/1444.html
27. YOF (Takayoshi Ohara + Ryu Furusawa + Tomoyuki Yanagawa) "2D Painting" — TOKAS, https://www.tokyoartsandspace.jp/archive/exhibition/2019/20191123-6957.html