As of the end of March 2026, I finished my four-year role as a Project Assistant Professor at the Art Media Center, Tokyo University of the Arts. In the end, I spent yet another full cycle of time—the length of a student’s journey from entering university to graduating.
What I was doing
I taught classes as well, but much of my work was not very visible from the outside. Looking back, my main role was helping launch and operate the Tokyo Geidai Art DX Project.
The background of how this started is fairly complicated, but I wrote about it in detail in an AMC Journal issue (an institutional journal) that is scheduled to be published in a few months. In the first year, things started with budget applications to MEXT. From the second year onward, my main work was running internal grants that support creative and research projects using digital technology across the university.
Thanks to that (for better or worse), from my very first year I was able to see the upper layers of university administration up close, which was a major learning experience.
In addition, from FY2023 to FY2025, I taught an electronics-oriented course called “Code and Design,” and in FY2023–FY2024 I taught “Media Art Programming II,” a course on expression through programming. In “Special Lecture in Media,” an omnibus guest-lecture course, I joined in FY2023 and FY2024 to help select guest speakers and to host talks. I also contributed an article to AMC Journal summarizing the content of Code and Design. Some course materials are available on my course materials website.
From 2023 to 2025, I was also reasonably able to conduct my own research with JSPS KAKENHI funding. Over four years, I published around four single-author peer-reviewed papers, so I think I managed at least a minimum balance. In my final year, while spending a full year on handover, I was also able to do things like a one-month research stay in New York, so I was able to do fairly substantial research. (Some may think one paper per year is too slow, but my average effort allocation was probably around 20% or slightly less…)
Through joint research with CCBT, I also worked on a music project for Deaf and hard-of-hearing children. Personally, this felt like entering a new kind of work for me. From there, I began seriously reading Jonathan Sterne’s impairment studies, which eventually led me to submit a review article to Medium 5, and I feel this added a new perspective that had been missing from my “Civil Engineering of Music” work.
Why I’m leaving
Originally, my employment term was three years, so I had planned to leave after three years from the start, but various things happened and I stayed for four.
From undergraduate through PhD, I went straight through without repeating a year or taking a leave, then worked four years immediately after. So despite talking about doing independent, self-directed research, I had never once stepped outside academia, and I felt that contradiction.
Also, as I mentioned, being able to see the administrative layers of a university was valuable in its own way. But I also felt that I stepped into that side of work very early in my career, and that I wasn’t able to focus enough on my own research and creative practice right in front of me. It was like becoming someone who distributes grants before fully being someone who receives them (a luxurious problem, I know). And I realized I can barely manage as a playing manager, but I’m probably not very suited to director/producer-type roles (which I kind of already knew). You only find out what fits by getting field experience, that part is true—but still.
That said, after four years, I feel again that Geidai is a workplace where I was truly fortunate in both colleagues and students.
What I’ll do next
I’m becoming a freelancer (i.e., unemployed). That said, this year I still plan to help with some Geidai work as a pinch hitter.
Right now I’m applying for Mitou Advanced, so I’ll decide based on that result in June. If I’m openly looking for work in June, you can read between the lines. I’m also applying to several overseas fellowships for FY2027, so I’m waiting for those results around May as well.
Until June, I plan to work hard on my long-delayed single-author book (based on my doctoral dissertation). I’ll aim for publication in early 2027.
For now, I should be much more flexible than in previous years regarding one-off lecture requests, writing commissions, and invitations to live performances or exhibitions, so please feel free to get in touch.