The exhibition “GEMINI EXHIBITION: Debug Scene”, in which six contemporary artists express the world view of “GEMINI Laboratory”, will be held from October 14th (Friday) to 25th (Tuesday), 2022 at ANB Tokyo. Yasushi Sakai, who studies consensus building in cities at the MIT Media Lab, will exhibit “MCP [roppongi]”, a work depicting the ambiguity in human decision-making and the relationship between physical and digital spaces. What is the “time series” that Sakai thinks is missing in the digital twin?

──So far, Mr. Sakai, you have been working on projects related to cities and collective consensus building. Have you specialized in this area since you were a student?

In university, I majored in informatics and architecture. Shigeru Ban, who was a professor at the university, told me that I should study architecture if I wanted to create things, so I started studying architecture. I learned both to create things with a hammer and informatics, so when I look back now, I feel like I was a “mixer” from the beginning. After graduating from university, I worked at Nikken Sekkei’s Digital Design Lab (DDL) for about four years, where I was involved in digital management, design, and program development.

──You are currently affiliated with the MIT Media Lab. What made you decide to study abroad?

I developed a product that can create a simple 3D CAD with a browser as a project in my DDL era. However, I added a rule that “you must inherit what the previous person made”. In addition, the similarity rate between a certain model and the model made before it is also calculated, and when a certain work is evaluated, the previous work similar to it is also evaluated. Through this project, I became interested in group design and its evaluation. Even when I was evaluated for a design assignment in my university career, I didn’t know what criteria my work was being evaluated on. That interest led me to decide to study abroad at MIT.

──What kind of research are you doing at MIT?

I am currently in the City Science Group at the MIT Media Lab. I have two interests. One is consensus building between machines. Machines form consensus. For example, blockchain is a mechanism in which computer nodes form consensus on a single ledger. Even for AWS, which is the cloud computing system of Amazon, It is how multiple located servers store information robustly without any discrepancies. Until around 2000, the emphasis was on theory, and from there it suddenly developed into an industry. I am interested in consensus building between such machines. The other is organization theory, which is the study of how people form consensus in organizations. I researched these two and chose cities as their application.

It seems difficult and inefficient for multiple people to design one thing, including cities and towns, but on GitHub, thousands of people are raising new versions of Linux in a few months. In this example alone, it has become commonplace for technology to intervene in human networks. I am researching such things in the context of “fuzzy cities.”

──What kind of work is MCP [roppongi] that will be announced at the “GEMINI Laboratory Exhibition” this time?

First, participants will vote through the venue’s interface on questions such as “Do you want more housing?” or “Do you want to focus on commerce?”, and it will reflect in the city. Behind the scenes, a game called “Cities: Skylines” will be used to simulate collective urban development during the exhibition period. Then, over time, the population will increase or decrease, and the birth rate and happiness level will change. For example, if the money runs out or the population decreases too much, we will start over again, but the work is designed to include the search process.

However, even in the real world, I think it’s generally difficult to understand decisions related to city planning. For example, ordinary people would not understand the meaning of “this area will be designated as a second-class residential area.” The request for approval is coded so it is not readable. It creates a situation where the visitor says, “I don’t really understand it, but I agree with it.” Democracy can only be established when there is some meaning to that vote, but we have to vote in a state where that is missing. This system creates a situation where you can make an agreement without knowing it, and then declare ownership of the city because of the agreement. By doing this, I would like to convey as a message the “gap” of making decisions without knowing who the mirror world/virtual world is for. In the second half of the exhibition, we will look at the towns and voting trends generated by disclosing information.

──You mean that it has a satirical meaning of “agreeing to what you don’t understand”?

I agree. While it is a criticism of agreeing without understanding the meaning, it also includes a criticism of the fact that things are progressing while it is unclear whose platform the digital twin is. However, the consensus building part is intentionally toned down. I think that if you suddenly ask people who come to see your art exhibition to form a consensus, register for a wallet, and participate in DAO, they will be confused.

──In the first place, what kind of theme and awareness of issues led to this work?

If only the digital twin was the theme, I don’t think I would have been so motivated. Digital twins emphasize two environments, the real world and the virtual world, and each person who perceives them has multiple environments. Choosing between the two is easy to understand, but there are many things to think about.

But with the concept of GEMINI in there, I felt that there was room for me to enter. GEMINI means twins, but there is a chronological implication that although the real world and the digital twin are twins, they have the same genes, but as time goes on, they become completely different people. . No matter what you do, time flows in the physical world. Things deteriorate and people die. On the other hand, the digital twin is digital and does not degrade. In other words, in order to achieve true twinhood, the digital side must be artificially degraded.

──What do you mean by time and deterioration in this work?

There are two types of units of time. One is the passage of time in the game. For example, a house will be born in a section that has been decided to be a residential area, or the number of people will increase or decrease. The other is the time axis of consensus building. You can understand that if a proposal such as “making this area a commercial area” is passed, it has advanced one step in the time axis of consensus building.

──You mentioned earlier that you felt uncomfortable with the fact that the digital twin emphasized two environments, but do you have a vision of the direction in which mirror worlds and digital twins should go?

When deciding on something, I think it’s cramped that you can only go in extreme directions. For example, some people generally disagree with Trump’s policy proposals, but think one policy is good. Or sometimes even liberals contradict what they say and what they do. I don’t think the world can be black and white like digital. By using such voting mechanisms, consensus-building processes, and technology like GitHub, I hope to be able to express things like “Red (Republican) and Blue (Democrat).” In a sense, voting is a tough activity where you have to choose black and white in a gray situation. On the other hand, if we change the system, I think we can contribute to the next deliberation.

──So you want technology to be able to express the gradation of decision making. As a final question, what do you want people to feel at this exhibition?

I would like to convey in an organizational structure that we can make our own decisions and change the world ourselves. When there is a vote in an election, I think you feel like, “Even if I say something, it won’t change.” In such a situation, no one would want to be interested in politics. Everyone is busy. If you think about it that way, I think games are a much more educational tool. It may be difficult to express in one work the feeling that things change in a certain direction when you press a certain button, but I hope you can feel it.

─ Listener: Shinya Yashiro