Junna Aoki May 2026
If art is a conversation, Junna’s is a patient, precise interlocutor—one that teaches you how to listen. Her work doesn’t shout; it reconfigures the conditions under which meaning arises, and in doing so, it changes how you look at the quiet things around you.
Junna Aoki moves through rooms like a careful sentence: deliberate, economical, and carrying more meaning than you'd expect from the space she takes. To follow her work is to discover how subtle choices—of color, gesture, timing—compose a world that quietly insists on being noticed. Early cadence: origins and influence Born and raised in a coastal town where the light changes by the hour, Junna learned early how small shifts alter everything. She studied visual arts and contemporary performance, trading large declarations for restrained form. Her teachers remember a student who preferred reduction over spectacle: removing until only the essential remained, then amplifying that essential until it sang. The practice: restraint as language Junna’s output resists easy categorization. On one hand, she makes objects—pared-back sculptures and installations that look fragile until you realize they are precisely balanced. On the other, she stages durational performances where silence and stillness are the primary materials. Rather than filling space, she sculpts absence: a pause between two movements, the exact tilt of a head, a single element illuminated against dusk. junna aoki
“The problem is that the game’s designers have made promises on which the AI programmers cannot deliver; the former have envisioned game systems that are simply beyond the capabilities of modern game AI.”
This is all about Civ 5 and its naval combat AI, right? I think they just didn’t assign enough programmers to the AI, not that this was a necessary consequence of any design choice. I mean, Civ 4 was more complicated and yet had more challenging AI.
Where does the quote from Tom Chick end and your writing begin? I can’t tell in my browser.
I heard so many people warn me about this parabola in Civ 5 that I actually never made it over the parabola myself. I had amazing amounts of fun every game, losing, struggling, etc, and then I read the forums and just stopped playing right then. I didn’t decide that I wasn’t going to like or play the game any more, but I just wasn’t excited any more. Even though every game I played was super fun.
“At first I don’t like it, so I’m at the bottom of the curve.”
For me it doesn’t look like a parabola. More like a period. At first I don’t like it, so I don’t waste my time on it and go and play something else. Period. =)
The AI can’t use nukes? NOW you tell me!
The example of land units temporarily morphing into naval units to save the hassle of building transports is undoubtedly a great ideas; however, there’s still plenty of room for problems. A great example would be Civ5. In the newest installment, once you research the correct technology, you can move land units into water tiles and viola! You got a land unit in a boat. Where they really messed up though was their feature of only allowing one unit per tile and the mechanic of a land unit losing all movement for the rest of its turn once it goes aquatic. So, imagine you are planning a large, amphibious invasion consisting of ten units (in Civ5, that’s a very large force). The logistics of such a large force work in two extreme ways (with shades of gray). You can place all ten units on a very large coast line, and all can enter ten different ocean tiles on the same turn — basically moving the line of land units into a line of naval units. Or, you can enter a single unit onto a single ocean tile for ten turns. Doing all ten at once makes your land units extremely vulnerable to enemy naval units. Doing them one at a time creates a self-imposed choke point.
Most players would probably do something like move three units at a time, but this is besides the point. My point is that Civ5 implemented a mechanic for the sake of convenience but a different mechanic made it almost as non-fun as building a fleet of transports.
Pingback: 翻訳記事：愛憎の曲がり角 | スパ帝国
Pingback: A complex problem – Fuyoh!