Taketo Muroi - Latent grains 8

Technique: Promptography on fine art paper
Image size: 30 x 30 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2025

Latent Grains 8

Latent Grains 8 marks a moment of heightened tension within the series. The color fields condense into a powerful focal point: red, yellow, green, blue, and violet no longer meet linearly, but rather seem to displace, overlap, and reshape one another. The transition here is not a smooth glide, but an unstable shift—a visual event.

Compared to the calmer works in the series, this image appears almost eruptive. The colors seem like energetic zones vying for dominance without ever fully prevailing. This is precisely its strength: the image rejects a clear hierarchy. No center, no edge, no "correct" viewpoint. Perception is forced to constantly shift.

From a Japanese perspective , Latent Grains 8 can be interpreted animistically: color here is not a carrier of meaning, but an independent entity with agency. Each chromatic zone possesses its own presence, its own "voice." In Zen Buddhism, this constellation is reminiscent of the state of inner turmoil that precedes insight—a moment in which opposites are not yet resolved, but can be experienced simultaneously.

From a media-critical perspective, the work points to algorithmic decision-making processes: The image appears as a visualization of competing probabilities. Nothing is finalized; everything remains potentially changeable. For Taketo Muroi, Latent Grains 8 is therefore not an endpoint, but a state of suspension—an image that shows how perception arises when order is momentarily suspended.