Taketo Muroi - Afterimage 3

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Image size: 45 x 30 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2025

Afterimage 3

In Afterimage 3, Taketo Muroi condenses the series' central motif into a precise, almost architectural juxtaposition. The image is strictly divided in two: On the left, a vibrant field of color pixels, layers, and gentle transitions unfolds, reminiscent of digital noise images, faulty memory fragments, or chromatic afterimages. On the right, however, is a seemingly homogeneous, gray surface whose order is undermined by breaks, shifts, and empty spaces.

This formal division is not a purely aesthetic decision, but rather points to two different modes of image production. On the left, the image appears as a process – fluid, unstable, generative. On the right, the image reveals itself as a structure – standardized, serial, functional. Yet this side, too, is not stable: the shifts in the material reveal that every order is fragile and every surface bears a history of interventions, losses, and repairs.

Afterimage 3 thus explores the tension between algorithmic image logic and physical reality. The digital afterimage is transferred to the material world, while the supposedly real surface itself becomes a simulation. Perception here appears as something retrospective: an echo of what has already been calculated, stored, and structured.

The work makes visible that images today no longer merely depict, but create conditions – conditions for how we interpret space, materiality, and time. Afterimage 3 is thus less an image about something than an image about seeing itself: about what remains after the original has long since vanished.