Under duress, our retinas invent starlife: glistening critters born from skull pressure. Like airborne tadpoles, or fruit-fly-sized droplets of optic nerve static, they drift off as our gaze lags behind.
(Phosphenes, as scientists call them, like to play hide and seek more than head-on staring contests. They can emerge in moments of anxiety, strain, collision, dizziness, and pixel fatigue.)
Our brain's visible warnings feel, for a moment, like a mystery that somehow belongs to us. In pain, in dolma, in algae, in pulp, in 3am studio hallucinations, curiosity can reveal a new story to tell, a new way of telling it. Why only animate on paper when you can animate within it?
For several years now, Montreal-based collaborators Emi Takahashi and Nik Arthur have added wind to a rippling art shift that favors physical material. They make printed works, music videos, and standalone animations with elements you’d have better luck digging up in a forest than Adobe Suite’s periodic table (or a plastics lab). The process is the point. Wide-eyed “what if” questions lead to stone-sawing, and vine-warping, and photon-bending, and UV printing, and tributes to the sun magnets that keep trees nourished, or rice wrapped in the Levant.
As chiseled (literally) as their work can be, Emi and Nik both welcome happy accidents. Glue discolors plant fibers. Molten pearl shines beneath a rock’s crust. Many of their efforts share a heart of sound. Ouri’s bourrée key movements, Hinako Omori’s celestial spinal tap, Ivy Boxall’s disintegrating sax, Jonah Yano’s strumming by the river bank, Will Miller’s laser-precision synth tones, Ghost Orchard’s bird songs. Each helps communicate the narrative backbone — complex plots expressed within a minute or two of animation. Ksha-sha and Leaf Galls, co-created by Emi and Nik, remind me that bruises first indicate damage; then, regeneration.
We spoke at length with the two artists about archiving, ingenuity, music, ethics, the internet, and lots more. We laughed quite a bit and hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did. This story was written while I listened to “bruise” by ghost orchard, “Broken Signal” by Dreams, “ambi2” by Maia Nelson, “Solid” by ML Buch, and “heal” by pentagon — a combined 211 times ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Siber: I imagine you sharing this fairy tale collaboration, living a stone’s throw away.
Emi Takahashi: Soon-to-be neighbors!
Nik Arthur: Emi told me and [Toko Hara, the visual artist and Nik’s partner] that she was trying to move soon, so we started inundating her with links to apartments as close to where we live as possible.
Emi: We’re only a 10-minute bike ride away as is. One of us will call the other and all of a sudden we’re spending the rest of the week experimenting with algae or paper or something. We did a flower-dying workshop this summer. You roll flowers up in cloth and boil them to pull the color.
Nik: Our Montreal lifestyle, along with learning French.
Emi: Because the city’s relatively affordable and friendly, it brings a lot of anglophones.
Nik: Who often act like the only language in the world that matters is English!
Emi: There’s a fine line between French cultural preservation and authoritarian laws.
Nik: I’m switching my healthcare from Ontario to Quebec, and I was told the doctors won’t speak to me in English after I’ve had a Quebec health card for six months. All paperwork’s in French for newcomers.
Emi: If you don’t understand your own doctor, and there isn’t a willingness to translate for you…
Nik: It certainly pushes you to learn the language. [Laughs]
Siber: All while making animations with nature. Music plays a major role in every project you’ve collaborated on, but your work with the Michigan artist Ghost Orchard is the only one developed for an artist, versus an artist creating a score alongside your animations.
Emi: That was the first time Nik and I ever really met. We did all of the leaf printing at my house.
Nik: We bonded over ambient music.
Emi: Growing up, folk music, lyrical music, was what I listened to most. I had a very electronic phase while living in Copenhagen, where there’s a vibrant DJ scene, then that transitioned to ambient and instrumental electronic music. I’ve been default stressed since the pandemic. [Laughs]
Nik: I listen to electronic music for a similar reason. I also think more abstract, ambient electronic reflects the direction my work’s gone. Less rushed, very curious. When you’re doing chlorophyll printing, for example, it takes patience because you’re fully reliant on the sun, working around what that star up there feels like doing. A big challenge was not wanting each frame to be on the same leaf, so we had to figure out how to create a bed of leaves so we could print on the whole thing at once.
Emi: Like a collaged plant picture frame. I had only worked with grape leaves before. We did the Ghost Orchard animation in October, so there wasn’t much green left. I wasn’t sure it was going to work. But the glue we used to keep the leaves together led to unexpected transformations in the printing process.
Nik: That was also what I’d consider my first time trying to do a major animation with natural material.
Emi: It was the other way around for me. Before that project, I didn’t know that you could create an entire animation with just one image, that sprite concept. It involves placing all the character positions onto a single sheet or canvas. The animation is then composited by cropping into each frame to create the sequence, which lets us make a lengthy and complex animation using a minimal number of leaves. It’s a big moment of joy when you get this unpredictable visual ‘reveal’ — when you know all the planning and labor paid off, like when the cloudy October sun left marks on the leaves in just a few hours. Another is watching Nik work his magic and bring the stills to life within minutes. It was such a rapid process. I was used to collaborations taking months, but we turned it around in one week.
Nik: Emi, you’ve worked with the artist Hinako Omori multiple times, have you noticed a difference between your visual projects that she’s scoring, versus visual projects made for her music?
Emi: For her album projects, the constraints we’re working within are primarily coming from her record label, so I wanted her to have as much space and free rein as possible, just knowing how good it feels to be on the receiving end of that. What about you?
Nik: I’ve worked under the leadership of music artists for so long. Now being able to reach out and ask them to make something for ‘my’ work, it’s a balancing act of freedom and guidance. We all need or want a different mix of those two things. I had a period where I told people, “I operate best when I have full freedom. Give me a budget and I’ll figure the rest out.” Then some people gave me that, and I was like… “I have no idea what to do with this.” [Laughs]
Emi: Some constraints are important. For us and for the other artists involved.
Nik: Like, I don’t want people to hear the saxophone on our Ksha-sha project and be like, “Wow, nice sax dude.” [Laughs]
Emi: It’ll be more integrated.
Nik: In the beginning, for Snowprints with Ghost Orchard, Wood Eels with Jonah Yano, and Leaf Galls with Hinako Omori, I didn’t know how to cut a story without a score because I’d only made music videos. They saw early drafts of the animations, and I just asked them to make something I could cut a sequence to. For Dodeda, with Will Miller, it was the opposite, and the story came first. Then it switched again for The UU — I asked Daniela Andrade to make a score first, and that inspired the entire animation and story. For Bewrop, Ouri had me over and played harp live with the animation running on a screen. That was mostly full runs, minimal music editing. We’ve had a lot of fun encouraging musicians to use their instruments in ways that aren’t usually taken seriously. Saxophones create such a special noise that comes just before the sound it’s known for.
Siber: You both chronicle, log, unmask your work. What drives you to archive?
Emi: Collecting and organizing visuals is a big part to my process — it’s more about building a personal library than formal archiving. I love the freedom of gathering images without a specific end goal, finding inspiration in what inspires others.
Nik: As a kid, I thought that libraries were so cool, and for some reason, for a long period of my life, I feel like I was made to believe that this wasn’t the case. The more I dig into research for projects, the more I realize I need to depend on other peoples’ archival practices to pull it off — camera stuff, germination.
Emi: We’re all building on, from, with each other. Archiving facilitates every step of that, even if you don’t see it on the surface. The here-there project I worked on was, explicitly, an effort to archive the Asian Canadian diaspora through community voices and audio stories. Thinking about what’s ‘worth’ backing up, what file types typically get that treatment versus not…
Nik: When I see how Emi manages her files, I see I can do better. [Laughs] I’ve started dating everything.
Emi: Make your files findable! [Laughs] That’s one thing I kept from working at a graphic design studio, that consistent file structure. Someone with zero context should be able to navigate the folders, or the record of different versions, and make sense of it. Keyboard mashing jdnjkdnsnfkjs.jpg doesn’t always work best.
Nik: With this Organima series, the ones I do that are more solo, my file directory is on my hard drive. The more collaborative ones, like Ksha-sha with Emi, it’s all on Dropbox. It’s completely communal from the very beginning. There isn’t a handoff process. Emi can open up the After Effects file and start messing around with it, though the infrastructure that makes that process feel fast and weightless for us isn’t pretty.
Emi: Everything ends up in a few different companies’ clouds.
Siber: Collective imagination, blinking away in AWS and Google data centers.
Nik: As long as it’s all up there, I want the story behind the work available too. I started publicly archiving process to make the truth of the ‘how’ less elusive. People see these methods as proprietary and they aren’t. If anyone wants to learn from me, it’s pretty much all there. That feels more human. The inverse is almost as if you’ve stolen something and you can’t let anyone find out that you have it. I used to comb through behind-the-scenes clips of movies and zoom in just to find out the type of camera. When I was 17, I wanted to know if they shot Because The Internet on film. This was 10 years ago, before the film resurgence. I found the guy who was First AC or something on that set and sent this long, super earnest email, like, “I want to be a film maker, this was so inspiring to me, did you shoot this on film, blah blah.” The guy responded: “16mm.” [Laughs] I’d watch animated films and try to confirm if they animated every frame — on 1s — or every other frame — on 2s. When the new Avatar movie came out, I saw so many stories saying James Cameron was a genius for ‘inventing motion grading,’ or switching the frame rates to make a scene more dynamic, which they’ve done in animation since the 80s. Janky discovery can be fun and rewarding, but it doesn’t encourage others to join these practices if you’re not forthright.
Siber: Honesty’s still underrated, and that access means so much when arts funding is as compromising and scarce as ever. I think a lot about the wave of ‘free art’ that spread across Europe after World War II, which the CIA funded through the invention of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and then about the corporate backing so many of us rely on now.
Nik: When I look at my past five years, I’ve gone from saying yes to 100% of things to 50% of things to 10% of things to less. I’ve avoided doing any Organima work with or for a client. Nature isn’t here to put a logo on it. For myself, I don’t want to see the natural matter around me as a canvas for advertising. When I did the YouTube job, I was excited because that’s a place I’ve spent so much time on and learned so much through, and the team had some of the most knowledgeable and caring people I’ve ever met. Then you learn about Google’s contract with the [IOF]. I’m trying to carve a path forward that focuses on production companies, grants, communal funding, the NFB of Canada — though institutions famously also suck. Sometimes I think I should just get a ‘regular’ job and do art in my spare time, but that doesn’t feel right either. We’re all entangled. Redefining what success means is on my mind a lot. It’s a strange twist that tech companies have been among the most willing parties to give money to me to do this stuff, and it’s largely because they’re some of the only sources left that have the capital to invest in art.
Emi: Even if politics aren’t at the forefront of art, like they were when I worked on the Surplus Data Poster or the Islanding project, which was a response to surveillance and military encroachment, every choice is driven by values that you can tie to political beliefs.
Nik: There’s so much distance between how things are and where they start, even with paper. Why’s it white? Because we bleach it. From the trees we create this abstracted thing that bears zero resemblance to its source. The Ksha-sha animation we worked on together gave us a chance to shrink that distance between origin and endpoint. Initially, I didn’t feel like my art was political, but I’ve come to understand it is, more and more, with the Organima projects. I wanted to improve my own relationship to nature, natural substances, and Organima exists from that.
Emi: Even with a day job, you’re compromised. Corporate branding at the graphic design studio was an environment that forced me to present these perfect mockups that shield the client from the mess it took to get there. And my relationship with the project ends with this fake, shiny image. I don’t see or feel the actual packaging, the true object I’ve essentially fabricated in software. I’ve tried to run as far away from that as possible. Even if a project had to be printed somewhere else, I’ll physically produce one myself, to prove to myself it’s real. Then of course I have to share it online as a record of its existence. [Laughs]
Nik: I don’t miss the mountain of Photoshop files on my old hard drives, but it does feel like people expect things to not be real now when you’re sharing your work online. I feel we have to go the extra step to even convince people it’s worth looking at for an extra second, and show that it’s not AI.
Emi: Things get flattened. There’s an ongoing race to make the difference imperceivable.
Nik: I’m sure people will make AI-generated process work. someone asked if the project we made was CGI. They think we’re the machine. [Laughs] The idea of a captive audience in a theatre feels less transient. I was listening to a group of environmentalists talking about sci-fi depictions of ecology that they considered positive. They all hated Dune, its logic. “We need to save the planet so we can make more money off of it,” but they loved Hayao Miyazaki’s movies. They make you want to go outside.
Emi: An idea I’ve been floating with friends, especially with Rebecca Wilkinson, is organizing a large-scale, collaborative workshop. We’d design a series of workstations with prompts that use unconventional tools and analog materials to encourage experimentation, performance, and play — everything tied around a theme, including the setting, the food, the music, the dress code. A full day event that engages all the senses.
Siber: It’s been swift, moving from “haters will say it’s photoshop” to “is this AI” to taking more AI content at face value, or trusting what ChatGPT says more readily. Emi, your project Where Grape Leaves Grow feels defiant in contrast.
Emi: That project was a big turning point for me as I left the graphic design studio. A Lebanese writer, Anna Daliza, approached me with the story and it felt special the moment I read it. She initially just wanted to typeset it a little better than Google Docs would let her. I brought on another friend, Michelle Kuan, and we got carried away in pursuit of this hand-sewn book. Custom debossing, sourcing a particular paper. We worked with a local bookbinder to create the first six copies. Collaborating so closely with the author and having so much autonomy helped me define what I wanted moving forward.
Nik: You created books for your solo exhibition in France too.
Emi: In France, those were entirely handmade, with many all nighters at the risograph. Where Grape Leaves Grow required a different level of craft, down to the color of the thread. Every conversation Anna, Michelle, and I had sprouted a bigger idea, and it was all out of pocket, so we ended up needing a Kickstarter to fund it all. [Laughs] It was a part-time job for over a year. We made 350 books in the end.
Nik: No compromises.
Emi: We were the budget! We’d just fit it all into the crowdfund. Leaving the design studio also put me in this place of throwing caution to the wind. Like, “Let’s just make the book of our dreams.” It was liberating, not being paid to do it, which was a huge privilege. The mockups we made were maybe $200 a book. When it came time to create the full run and sell them, we looked at art books we loved and researched their printers. We sent our mockup book to a printer in Europe to see if they could faithfully reproduce it. They did, and that was that. They brought the cost down by about half, so… we made no money.
Nik: How did the research impact the book? Did you interact with the grape leaf itself?
Emi: We still found ways to make this sprawling passion project quite structured. We had presented a deck to the author, Anna, at the beginning. [Laughs] Some habits stick with you. We were able to embed all of these references to her story within the physical material, these different metaphors. Anna had such a close relationship with the subject and knew what references to expand on. The process of folding, rolling, and wrapping rice in grape leaves inspired the book’s packaging. The green cover and extended inner flap wrap around the white pages, holding the story, as an homage to the dish. We also created custom glyphs inspired by the growth cycle of the grapevine plant, debossed on the covers and arranged like a secret botanical language, echoing the dialogue inside. Picking the right shade of green was a big deal, around #798C3A. We touched a lot of paper.
Nik: Researching textures might be my favorite thing to do. Was the paper you went with toothy?
Emi: Eggshell-y, toothy, off-white…
Siber: The book was meant to immortalize warak enab as this cultural touchstone, and, within that, a family memento, a rite of passage. The book is inseparable from that joint lineage.
Emi: At the start, Anna had shared a short writing sample of the book. In a couple pages, she articulated this complex feeling through simple dialogue: the loss of ancestral and cultural connection. A couple months into us working on When Grape Leaves Grow, I lost both of my Japanese grandparents. So in a way, it was healing to work on this story with such similar themes. This passage at the start resonated a lot: “What if I do forget? Will I remember them forever? I wasted my chance to understand them. I wish I had learned more. I wish I had been less ashamed when Baba spoke Arabic in front of my friends.”
Siber: I’m sorry, Emi. It’s divine timing for a project to be a source of solace and processing loss, a way of moving forward. You both manage to reach back in time for references or techniques without really contributing to the nostalgia machine.
Emi: In the last 4 years, I’ve started collecting what I call “horticultural glyphs,” a kind of umbrella term for fleurons or any ornamental typographic elements related to plants. They’ve been a recurring presence throughout the history of typography. It’s hard to explain why I’m drawn to them, they just feel so special, little symbols with hidden meanings. I mostly find these in open-source archives like the Internet Archive, libraries, university collections, buried in old type specimen books. My most recent find was this fall at a booth at the Montreal Art + Book fair. I came across these French micro-leaflets on various agricultural topics and sayings from the 1940s-60s, all adorned with intricate glyphs on the covers and interior pages. It definitely informs some of my work. I like to embed new meanings into glyphs and use them in unexpected ways.
Nik: Earlier this year, I was researching petroglyphs — these ancient human mark-making techniques on stone. It was prep for the Dodeda project, which uses the surface of a rock I found as an animation space. I was reading about one petroglyph on Wikipedia that looked like a bull’s eye, named cup-and-ring marks, which no one’s definitively deciphered the meaning of. Then I listened to a lecture about archaeology on YouTube, talking about where these marks had been found. The guy mentions this archaeology book cataloguing every known instance of these bull’s eye petroglyphs in the UK, as well as every known theory about their possible meaning. He’d rate them 1 to 10. [Laughs] The Prehistoric Rock Art of Galloway & The Isle of Man by Ronald W. B Morris. His diagrams had a big impact on Dodeda.
Siber: There’s a project log from 2021 where Emi talks about using “the usual tools” — I think that meant Adobe suite software. Now, for both of you, “usual tools” could encompass anything, from a bacteria strain to a multi-mirrored lens contraption.
Emi: My Epson scanner is right here by my side. I love Figma for making digital collaboration feel as effortless as you can get. I have my trusty monochrome Brother laser printer.
Nik: Emi’s had this black-and-white printer her whole life.
Emi: It gives this really nice half-tone texture. And it’s a tank! [Laughs] It’s like a risograph for me at this point. For type design, or even for Where Grape Leaves Grow, I used the Glyphs app to make symbols. Nik, I feel like every project you learn a new material and buy new tools to explore it.
Nik: I used to use the scanner a lot, the Epson V600. There used to be a heated debate among Epson owners about what the best scanning app is.
Emi: I use Epson’s app. It does what I need it to do.
Nik: Epson Scan 2 is famously terrible. It’s so under-equipped. They haven’t updated it in years even though the scanner’s sought after. I’m loyal though. I use my newer phone and my older phone a lot. If I take 300 pictures for animation, I can just open up the Photos app and just scroll through to see it.
Emi: Our three projects together have all been chlorophyll-coded, if we can call that a tool. We only make green work. [Laughs] Tweezers are a vital tool for us. Cotton swabs, tooth brushes. Working with different leaves and strands requires such precise movements.
Nik: We couldn’t find any tools designed, or at least marketed for, stripping a leaf’s exterior, removing its pulp, or handling wet plant fiber. You just use what’s around, which is always the most fun. It’s like woodworking, when you make your own jig for a specific purpose.
Emi: Inventing new ways of using old things.
Siber: Your collaborations are organic, in the literal sense, almost ancient, but they also have these uncontainable bursts. The natural substance is manipulated.
Nik: The word we use is “intervention.” We were collaborating on Ksha-sha with two other friends of ours, Masumi Rodriguez and Elena Kirby. They are the paper-making and materials experts for our main source: a plant called dog-strangling vine. We felt collectively motivated to let that substance do the talking. The big question for us, when we were figuring out how we were going to animate this thing, was: to what degree are we intervening, and how much is too much. Because we think of the substance as a collaborator that we’re lucky to work with. Bewrop might be my favorite of the Organima bunch because it required the most minimal sleight of hand: dropping droplets of water into more water. For a lot of the animations, on a frame by frame level, the substance makes the choices more than any of us.
Emi: One experiment that hasn’t made it into a project (yet) was when I was deep into sun printing. I tried printing on a series of root vegetables and fruit: carrot, radish, jicama, taro, apple... There’s something exciting about working with such unpredictable materials. The results were ephemeral, really fun, and strange. I’d like to keep exploring image-making with organic resources around me, discovering new processes that reveal or inform a visual language or pattern inherent to the materials.
Siber: Patience feels like a nonstarter to do what you both do. It’s hard not to notice that, as the internet eats itself, as AI simultaneously improves and dilutes itself, as explore pages continue to accelerate mimicry and taste optimization, you’re referencing the coil of centipedes.
Emi: We’re constantly talking about this. I don’t know if I identify myself as part of a movement, if I can call it that, right now, but it’s absolutely aspirational for me: slowly moving farther away from work that’s only digital, even if it’ll solely exist online for most people. [Laughs]
Nik: It’s kind of like Andy Goldsworthy. He’d go out into the forest and make this beautiful sculpture out of rocks that no one but him and the trees would ever see. Then he had to take a photo of it and put it in a gallery, and he was called a photographer. [Laughs] If this is a movement, I hope it snowballs. I hope it’s not just a trend. It’s hard to say if it’s only something people are noticing and doing because it performs well on socials, or because it inspires them and makes them feel. But I think it’ll continue as a response, if nothing else, to AI-generated art.
Emi: Ultimately, the reason we made an animation out of a leaf is because Nik messaged me on Instagram. He had seen my work there. And now we’re back talking about the leaf. [Laughs]
Nik: I do want to be real with myself, that the work we’re making is, in some way, created because of these digital spaces. There’s no fully disassociating from it, or disowning it. If i had never made an Instagram account, I wouldn’t be making any of this, because I wouldn’t have gotten fed up with Instagram and digital design. It’s the archive we’re all participating in.
Siber: Do the Organima characters orbit the same sun?
Nik: Yes, they’re all parts of a wider story, one world. I read this essay by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics. It’s a made-up scientific report about how animals communicate, written as four separate studies by four different researchers. For me, Organima is about the spirit of these natural materials. It’s a life force we’re just beginning to witness and identify.
Emi: I love how the Ksha-sha character is able to express itself so freely and passionately with bursts of life, even in a ‘foreign’ environment. This past year, since moving to Montreal, I’ve been piecing together my own version of a new home and community, much like Tch does in Leaf Gall,
Siber: The visuals are so stunning that the stories can slip under the radar sometimes.
Nik: The writing behind the animations is what prevents them from feeling random, but I dislike that structure in a different context. I’d like to explore film-length nature documentaries that don’t impose this hyper-rational desperation for control. You watch this lizard barely escape its snack nemeses, and you’re rooting for the lizard, then you learn they used three different lizards shot over six days. Many underwater scenes are filmed in tanks, not the oceans. Just listen to the sound design. It’s not real. [Laughs]
Siber: That feels like a good place to wrap up. This interview was brought to you by the International League of Nature Docs Skeptics. Thank you both, stay hydrated up there.
Emi: I’m drinking herbal tea. All my honey’s from local bees only.
Nik: Emi was just shaming me for my budget short-grain rice.
Emi: I’m paying like 14 CAD for 2kg but that lasts me awhile.
Nik: We’re paying 7 CAD for 2kg. Half the cost… We’ll need to do some taste tests comparing the two grains. [Editor’s note: Emi, Nik, and Toko conducted a blind rice taste test. Emi’s rice won.]
Emi’s Music Picks
- Slow Attack Ensemble: “Rivers Turn To Waterfalls”
- Nala Sinephro: “Continuum 3”
- H. Takahashi: “Shallows”
Nik’s Music Picks
- Daniel Aged: “Home Lost”
- Haruomi Hosono: “Laughter Meditation”
- Woo: “Taizee”
