Below is the text I wrote for the catalogue of Ogaki Biennale 2006 which I directed in collaboration with Gunalan Nadarajan. We invited artists from seven Asian countries to the city of Ogaki, and we believe this perhaps was the first big media festival focusing on Asia. "Janken and the Power of Chance" is the main theme for the Biennale.

Highly advanced civilization distinguishes human beings from other living organisms, but what has enabled human beings to attain civilization? Perhaps the easiest answer is that humans have large brains that make them "smarter" than other animals, but while it is true that human brains are larger than those of many other animals, it is wrong to assume that a larger brain necessarily equals a smarter creature. Such an assumption satisfies the old and simple sense that humans have of themselves as the lords of creation, but the size of the brain has no direct relation to smartness, nonetheless.

What does it mean for a species to be "smart"? If it means competence in realizing the ultimate goal of survival, in maintaining individual as well as collective life with minimal cost and maximal certainty, human beings don't seem to be smarter than fish or insects, some of which, with brains far smaller than ours, have surprisingly smarter strategies for survival. Put cynically, viruses and bacteria can be regarded as much smarter than us because they did not develop such a cumbersome organ as a brain in the first place.

If I am going too far talking about micro-organisms, let's look at ourselves. Men's brains are larger than those of women, and adults' brains larger than those of children. But it is highly questionable that adult men are smarter than the others because of their bigger brains, considering all these meaningless wars, inequalities and destructions in the world they manage. And how about difference among races? In regard to the average proportion of brain weight to the weight of the body, the Mongoloid has a little heavier brain than the Caucasoid or Negroid. This fact, again, can flatter an outdated racist pride that some persist in having, but it is nonetheless obvious that the weight or size of brains has no relation whatever to superiority in intelligence or civilization of a particular race.

Recently in Japan we see a fad in which people speak of "training the brain," a kind of mental version of exercising. There are drill books and gadgets designed for this weird practice, focusing mainly on brain powers such as memory and calculation, which are relatively easier than other functions of the brain to measure. Media try to convince people of the necessity of improving or maintaining brain power, resisting the natural process of getting old. In contemporary society, aging is hated, not only as it relates to physical appearance but also mental ability. Today we have no freedom to go senile.

It might be desirable to keep the "high level of performance" of our body and our intelligence forever, but sticking to this idea too much would lead us to ignore much more essential issues of life. Some important problems cannot be solved however advanced our physical and mental abilities may be. Aging itself, the decline of ability, is one of them, along with unexpected illnesses, accidents, and natural and man-made disasters. More essentially, there is the basic "chance" of our being, of being born in a certain time and place, as an individual just as we are. Not all these conditions are purely accidental, of course, but we cannot improve them by our own ability or effort. Life is permeated by chance, and human beings for thousands of years have formulated various ways of addressing it. Instead of making a program to solve a certain problem, there is a way of accepting the problem and understanding the meaning of our own life as it seems to be threatened by chance. This way shows the other side of human civilization and demonstrates the specific character of human intelligence.

In our contemporary society, however, this aspect of intelligence is not paid its deserved respect. This is because the dominant understanding of human intelligence, which treats every issue as a problem to be solved, is so widespread. With advanced technological development, humans are now able to cure or to avoid diseases and natural menaces which long have been accepted as destiny, and to control to some extent birth, aging and death, which were believed to belong to the realm of God. Today people put the highest value on technology that enables or hopes to enable all these achievements. Living in this society, we are persuaded to believe that every problem in life can be solved by effort, invention and technological progress.

Information technology is the field in which we most obviously find this technological thinking. The identification of human smartness with the performance of the brain is often justified by employing the computer as a model of intelligence. It is a model that has become convincing to many of us. Computers are everywhere and constitute an indispensable part of daily life, at least in "advanced" countries. Taking the computer as a model, people attempt to "program" the state, society and even individual lives, and when something doesn't work as expected, they set out to find the "bugs." When, for example, something is wrong with the industrial, political or educational "system," people search for some wrongdoing persons, inappropriate regulations, or security holes, and conclude that they can solve the problem by replacing these "parts" with better ones, by making new rules, or by enhancing surveillance.


Of course, it is not at all my intention to deny this way of thinking. On the contrary, the systematic, technological form of thinking is among the most important parts of human intelligence as it has been refined through the centuries. But our contemporary society seem to depend too much on it, and to lose a healthy balance of mind. In other words, we seem to be insensitive to the aspects of the real world that cannot be tackled by technological thinking.

When I had the initial idea of "Janken: the Power of Chance" as the theme for Ogaki Biennale 2006, I liked it because it would fit the pleasant atmosphere of a media art festival as I hoped to direct it, and in thinking about this theme more carefully, I found it more and more significant in the context of our situation today, as I have argued above. The focus on Asian media arts is important not only because such a media arts show has not yet taken place, but also because we hoped to learn from attempts of Asian media artists to interpret technology and combine it with art, learn new insights about the relation of art and technology different from those we have seen in many Western-oriented media arts, including those in Japan. I find this direction especially important as the school IAMAS, with its agenda of fusing artistic and technological activities, is located in the local city of Ogaki.

It is not that simple, of course, to open a critical view on our contemporary world just by focusing on the topic of "chance." The question is: how should we see and talk about "chance"? To put it more concretely, while we may regard "chance" as an opportunity to achieve some kind of success, and strive to gain the ability or intuition to avoid bad chances and to take good ones, we are not experiencing "chance" in its true sense. "Chance," as valued in terms of a possible future success, seems to mean something else.

In order to think about this issue more clearly, I would like to take as an example of the idea of "serendipity." This is more or less an established word in English, but when we think carefully its exact meaning is not exactly evident. The word was originally coined by the eighteenth-century English writer Horace Walpole, based on his childhood reading of a Persian fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. "Serendip" is an old name for Sri Lanka. The story begins with the three princes, all endowed with wisdom, courage and artistic talent, leaving the kingdom to travel in search of a secret scroll in which they hope to find a magic spell to get rid of the dragons threatening the sea around their country. But it is not easy to achieve this purpose, and they come across other problems and adventures instead, which they overcome in unexpected ways by their surprising vision and foresight.

In a letter to a friend Walpole mentioned this story, and said that he had "serendipity," a special sense of finding something by accidental sagacity. Hence, the word came to be used to refer to a case of finding something one has not expected, by pure chance. Scientists, especially, have liked the word, when they talk about their great discoveries or inventions. In fact, we find many such cases of accidental findings in the history of science and technology, such as the discovery of the X-ray or penicillin, despite the fact that many people think the progress of science and technology has been achieved by way of rational thinking. Since brilliant scientists are often good-natured and a little naive, when they have been praised for their genius they often have taken great pleasure in speaking of their discoveries as brought about by chance.

In the ordinary sense of the word, serendipity means a kind of good luck we have when an intended plan or program fails, but in such a way that something better than the original plan takes place. Certainly serendipity tells something about the power of chance. But we should be aware that it refers to the power of chance only after chance has led to a certain success. The word serendipity looks back on the intervention of chance as a transcendental power at a crucial moment in the past. Therefore, it potentially means something like the grace of God, beyond human intentions and reasoning.

However, is The Three Princes of Serendip really about serendipity? It is not, as you will see if you read the story without prejudice. Nothing in it clearly suggests serendipity in the sense Walpole meant, and that many scientists have referred to. Talking about a kind of story in which a hero finally comes to an unintended success by the power of chance, we could find numerous other fairy tales and old narratives which originate from Asia as well as from many other parts of the world. The Three Princes of Serendip is not unique at all in this sense.

What is fascinating about The Three Princes of Serendip and other such stories is that while the smartness or wisdom of the princes and other such protagonists has little to do with so-called serendipity, they present a far deeper insight about chance.

Let's look at a famous episode about a stray camel, which has been mentioned by many, including Walpole himself. The princes come across a caravan and a man in it who asks if they have seen his lost camel. The princes have not seen the camel, but they ask if it was blind in one eye, missing a tooth, and lame. It was indeed, and having exactly described the missing animal the princes were suspected of having stolen it. They were brought to the Emperor and required to explain how they had been able to give an accurate description of something they had never seen. They had deduced that the camel was blind in one eye, they told the Emperor, because the grass had been eaten only on one side of the road, that one of its teeth was missing because they had found along the road clumps of chewed grass exactly the size of a camel's tooth, and that the camel was lame because they had seen the trail in the road left by one dragged leg. The Emperor and others present greatly admired the smartness of the three princes.

This episode can be read as showing an unusual case of deductive intelligence, but it has little to do with serendipity in the sense of a chance discovery of something unexpected. In his use of the word serendipity in the letter to his friend Walpole seems to mean the ability to deduce a fact by way of faint clues instead of unexpectedly making a chance discovery. Does it follow from this, though, that The Three Princes of Serendip has little to do with the power of chance? The answer is no. If you read further you will find that the story does tell about the power of chance, but in a sense totally different than that of serendipity.

One illustration of the point is the episode in which a giant hand appears upright from the sea and terrorizes people by sometimes picking up one of them and throwing him into the sea. The princes cross the sea and visit a queen who has asked them to rid her country of this menace. They go to the beach and the eldest prince confronts the hand, which appears with its five fingers open. When the prince holds up his own hand with the second and third fingers erect and the others folded, the giant hand with its five open fingers disappears under the sea and never appears again. In other words, the prince defeats the giant hand by producing "scissors" against "paper." I would like to say that this is the origin of Janken, but unfortunately it is not. The episode nonetheless reveals something important about the power of chance. When the queen of the country asks the prince how he was able to defeat the giant hand, he answers that by showing its five fingers erect the hand had appeared to give people an important message: if five men unite for the single purpose they can govern the kingdom well. The hand had resorted to violence when it did because the people in their fear could not read its message. When the prince held his own hand up with only two fingers erect he was demonstrating, he said, that not five but only two people working for a single purpose could govern the kingdom. The giant hand had disappeared because finally its message had been understood.

The giant hand had appeared to the people as a meaningless terror because no one understood its message. The smartness of the prince was precisely his ability to find a sign in what others had regarded only as a fury, and to decode it as language. Unlike the episode about the camel, however, the prince gives no explanation about how he came to understand the message of the giant hand. It is as if he had chosen "scissors" without any clue against the "paper" of the hand, and suddenly a meaning and a communication took place. This is not serendipity, nor even ability or intelligence in the normal sense of the words. It is rather an act done with an empty mind at a moment of truth. As I understand it, the power of chance is at work at such a moment.

Today smartness means basically the ability to calculate and to reason logically, the power to process information. What is assumed in the background of this understanding is a world in which those who can make the most exact predictions, and those who are capable of coping with the largest number of possible situations, will survive in the end. The development of this ability is indeed one important aspect of civilization. In the real world, however, often we face the unpredictable. By confronting a situation beyond calculation and prediction, our inherent abilities emerge and take us in unexpected directions. It is crucial that we recognize the importance of this moment. It is when chance works. Protected in our technological environment we emphasize too much the following of a plan or a program, and thereby experience less and less the power of chance. This is the reason we need the intervention of art. Media art, in particular, with its agenda of intervening in technology itself and interpreting it in alternative ways, challenges us in this way.

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