Shunsuke Takawo (Japanese, b. 1981) is a creative coder whose practice centers on daily coding, a self-directed discipline of writing and publishing a new generative sketch nearly every day since 2015.,He compares the process to musical improvisation, writing code “as though I'm improvising with a musical instrument”, with sketching becoming “like humming a melody”. By the end of 2022 he had published around 1,800 sketches through this daily practice.
Takawo graduated from the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in 2008, where he researched new ways of viewing digital photography. That year he showed Depth of the Field - Processing Photography Blink Series at Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, using computer vision to detect a viewer's blink. Meeting the artist Zach Lieberman, who also used openFrameworks, made him want the freedom to express himself through code. He began coding daily in 2015, first in Processing and from 2019 in p5.js, publishing the sketches on OpenProcessing under a Creative Commons license.For Takawo the code carries the artist's intent as much as the image it produces, since viewers can read that intent directly in the code that generated the work.,
In 2021 Takawo released Generativemasks, a generative NFT project of 10,000 masks built by combining geometric patterns and shapes, evoking Native American totem poles and Japanese yōkai, with each mask changing color on every refresh.The project drew international attention, and its proceeds later helped fund the Japan Generative Art Foundation.,Takawo founded the Foundation in 2022 with fellow generative artist Alexis André as one of its directors, aiming to organize exhibitions, support artists, and build international networks.Since 2022 he has served as the Foundation's representative director, and since 2024 he has also been an associate professor in the media expression department at Konan Women's University, after seven years as a lecturer there.In 2022 Ayumu Nagamatsu built on Takawo's code to create 3D Generativemasks, turning 10,000 of the NFTs into individually 3D-printed physical masks for their holders.
Takawo draws on Japanese ukiyo-e prints, simulating their grain and flatness in his graphics, and credits computer art pioneers such as Hiroshi Kawano and Computer Technique Group as influences on generative art in Japan.Having read Kawano's writings, Takawo has said he was deeply influenced by Kawano's pursuit of aesthetics through programming. In 2024 he contributed Patterns of Flow to a group exhibition of the same name at NEORT++ in Tokyo and on Feral File, using a motif of geometric tiling that echoes Kawano's own idea of flow.
