Taketo Muroi - Afterimage 7

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

Afterimage 7

Afterimage 7 consistently pursues the serial logic of the work and condenses it into a particularly clear media-critical statement. The image is strictly divided and simultaneously internally fragmented: on the left, an industrial, functional architecture – grids, metal surfaces, technical installations, signs, barriers. Everything appears controlled, modular, reduced to functionality. This half of the image is reminiscent of the infrastructures of modern societies, of systems that are visible but no longer legible.

The right side of the image breaks down into several layers: colored light trails, digital glitches, grid-like textures. Here, the image loses its material reliability. What initially appears to be abstract painting reveals itself as a visual condensation of algorithmic processes—a trace of machine perception that no longer distinguishes between surface and depth.

This juxtaposition makes the central theme of the Afterimage series particularly clear: reality and simulation are not opposites, but rather overlap. The industrial order of the left side continues on the right as visual unrest. Control tips into instability, structure into noise. The image shows not a break, but a transformation.

Within the context of Japanese thought, this work can again be interpreted animistically. Even technical systems appear here not as inanimate matter, but as active agents with their own dynamics. The digital color flows act like energies circulating through the image – invisible, yet effective. From a Zen Buddhist perspective , Afterimage 7 rejects any hierarchy between the image zones. No level is more important than another; meaning arises in transition, in the in-between.

For Taketo Muroi, the afterimage is not an effect, but a state: that which remains when orientation, clarity, and reference disintegrate. Afterimage 7 is thus less an image about technology than an image emerging from it—a silent, precise document of a perception that has fundamentally changed in the age of artificial intelligence.