Parallel World Family

Parallel World Family explores boundaries between self and others through daily life and photography. AI-blended and untouched images coexist, revealing shifts in perception and prompting reflection on unseen layers within our everyday world.

We, Fujimura Family, have been exploring the theme of “boundaries between self and others” through both our art projects and daily life. We believe that personal and intimate events within our everyday surroundings often hold fundamental questions that resonate universally. Our photobook Parallel World Family is a continuation of that exploration.

This project draws attention to the many boundaries that exist in daily life—between self and others, humans and nature, reality and unreality, sensation and recognition. We believe that by becoming aware of these subtle divisions, life has the potential to flexibly expand its perception and concepts. Since we tend to perceive the world within limited frameworks, we hope this work offers viewers an opportunity to reconsider their own perspectives, values, and worldviews.

The rise and integration of AI technology highlights these boundaries in symbolic and striking ways. In this project, we instruct AI to blend two or three of our original photographs, generating new composite images that are used as part of the work. These AI-generated visuals resonate with our own artistic worldview, as they are fundamentally built from our gaze and memories.

In the photobook, AI-generated images coexist with entirely untouched, unedited photographs. One cannot easily distinguish between them—and that ambiguity is precisely one of the central intentions of the work. The boundaries between the “real” created by humans and the “unreal” produced by AI begin to blur, revealing the instability of perception and assumptions we take for granted.

The act of a non-human entity generating unreal images based on real ones brings the sense of boundaries into sharp focus. This is neither a critique nor a celebration of technology, but rather a way to utilize a contemporary tool in order to visualize the presence of boundaries in our time.

Boundaries are born unconsciously in our everyday lives. They can protect us, but also cause suffering. They are not inherently good or bad—they simply exist. With this work, we do not aim to resolve these boundaries, but to invite awareness of them and their fluid, layered nature.

Through this project, we hope to inspire recognition of the many unseen and unrecognized worlds that surround us. Parallel World Family is a quiet, poetic attempt to reconsider the richness of life. It invites reflection—connecting the visible and invisible, the known and unknown, the self and the other.

Below is a poem as a statement.

I am trying to translate knowledge that is clearly known, yet not felt.
Redefining, deepening, and transforming our perception of a world that continues to generate infinitely.
And within that realm of endless possibilities, we encounter impulses.
By accessing memories that are not our own, boundaries begin to dissolve, and contradictions lose their weight.
We seek to tangibly grasp all parallel worlds that exist in reality, and to physically sense the unseen borders.

Reproducing the chaos of reality.
A world that does not pursue universality or reproducibility.
A boundary that does not confine the questions arising from relativity.
Simply drifting.
Advancing through contact.

What is it to be human?
What is it to live?
Creative, uncertain—where objectivity and subjectivity blur into ambiguity.

When we gaze at ourselves and our lives through accidental events that transcend their original intention,
we are surprised to find memories of family and personal concepts intermingled unexpectedly within the fluctuations of desire.
It is very much like observing nature with an imaginative eye.

Each person holds contradictions that are, in their own way, still true.
What do we cherish, how have we perceived things, and how have we lived?
While feeling the joy of engaging with this delicate and complex society,
we want to surrender to the sway of a far richer and more diverse world that lies beyond.
Entrusting our wishes and prayers to the flow, hoping to become a part of the web of connection.

We have explored the presence of life in the everyday and the unity of living and artistic expression through works such as PROOF OF LIVING (2021) and SOUND OF EXISTENCE (2023). These projects naturally laid the foundation for Parallel World Family, which delves deeper into the theme of boundaries in a more layered and complex way.

※The dummy book in the Youtube video is an image that I printed at home. This work of ours has not yet been published or sold.