Koji Sato (Renpoo Tsukioka)

A creative technologist exploring the intersection of art, science, and humanity.

A Waterfall around Mt. Fuji

I am Koji Sato (Renpoo Tsukioka), a creative technologist who wields technology as a probe to explore the depths of our world.

As an artist and designer.

As an engineer.

And as a researcher.

My career has been consistently driven by a singular quest: to visualize the invisible and make the complex experienceable.

The following is a trajectory of that quest.

My Trajectory

Phase 1: From Drawing to Implementation — The World of 3DCG

Miranda

My journey began nearly three decades ago with a career as a 3DCG designer. Through my work on computer graphics for anime, games, and industrial products, I moved beyond merely creating beautiful images to a deep immersion in the underlying structures—particularly the “blueprints of life” found in the muscles and skeletons of the human body.

I dedicated myself to the challenge of implementing these structures with both realism and artistry in a virtual space. The culmination of this pursuit is “Miranda,” a 3D human model equipped with a proprietary muscle rig, which has been downloaded over 250,000 times worldwide.

Phase 2: The Pursuit of Phenomena — An Intersection of Knowledge

Time-development of AUTO Correlation Function

Time-development of Inter-Channel CROSS Correlation Function

Demonstration of xcor-Analyzer (YouTube)

The development of “Miranda” led me to new questions: “What is ‘REAL’, as opposed to mere ‘REALITY’?” and “How do we perceive the world?”

Driven by these fundamental inquiries, I stepped into the world of academic research at the University of Tokyo’s Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies. There, I took a cross-disciplinary approach to visualize phenomena that were previously unseen.

  • Drawing an analogy from the “structural color” that gives the Morpho butterfly its iridescent shimmer, We discovered and defined “Structural Timbre,” a component that constitutes the texture of sound.
  • Using a foundation in physics, I solved the long-standing mystery of the Differential Tones hidden in Ancient Greek music scale.
  • From the subtle time lag between a stereo microphone’s left and right channels, I established an analytical method to observe spacetime itself through sound.

All of these were attempts to illuminate the black box of sensibility and art with the light of mathematics and technology.

Alongside my academic research, I also sought to apply the visualization skills I cultivated to solve more tangible social problems.

This led to my work with the citizen volunteer group, “Open Kawasaki.” At the time, the open data provided by Kawasaki City was limited to difficult-to-process PDF reports. Buried within this data was a less visible, yet critical, social issue: the challenge of ‘Food Desert Problem’ faced by residents of the city’s aging housing complexes.

I painstakingly integrated these disparate sources, overlaying geographical information with demographic statistics onto a single map. This process allowed me to render the very structure of this social problem as one coherent visualization. This, too, was for me a practical application of my quest to “visualize the unseen.”

Phase 3: A Return to the Self – Spain, and the Whereabouts of the Soul –

East (Sun dawn) side of Sagrada Familia

West (Sunset) side of Sagrada Familia

The pursuit of logic and technology, however, led me to a new question: “Where does the soul reside?”

I realized I had lost my way, caught in the gap between the world I had dreamed of since childhood and the reality before me. To find an answer, I let go of my career and embarked on a month-long journey to Spain. For me, it was a pilgrimage to return to myself.

As I felt the soul of Flamenco (Duende) on the arid lands of Andalusia, I became certain: truly valuable creation is born not just from logic and data, but from the human passion, chaos, and beauty that exist beyond, or deep within, them.

In recent years, I have also visited disaster-stricken areas in Japan, witnessing with my own eyes and ears the ‘Real’ that cannot be experienced or understood through media in the metropolitan area.

My Philosophy

After this long and winding road, the compass of my inquiry now points in a clear direction.

It is to use technology, not to dissect human nature, but to amplify it.

Just as the light and shadow of cinema, or a dialogue with AI, have expanded my own perceptions and words, I want the technology I create to be a “probe” for others to experience the world more deeply and richly. To stand at the boundary of REAL and Perception, and to continue exploring its endless fascination.

That is my mission as a creative technologist.

Where data meets philosophy, and technology reveals the unseen. Essays on viewing the world through a different lens.

  • [For Work Inquiries:] I accept freelance requests for data visualization, research, and technical consulting.
  • [Access:] renpoo__at__behind-universe.org