TOMOYA  ISHIBASHI

Microscopique Poésie is a series of practices that intersect microscopic environments, artificial intelligence, and Matsuo Bashō through a microscope made from river trash. It explores contemporary environmental concepts intertwined with human intervention, as well as human curiosity and desire to observe and compose poetry about nature. It consists of the following three works, including past pieces.​
 

Self-reference Microscope (2025)

A project where I built a DIY microscope using trash and natural objects found near my childhood home along the Arakawa River, then peered into the river's water. I bricolaged chance encounters, created observation devices, and opened new worlds, allowing technology and poetry to permeate each other.

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Kanda-Josui Microscope

​The Kanda River flows near the venue, the Institut français de Tokyo. This work was created following historical research and fieldwork on the Kanda-Josui, an ancient water supply system whose remnants remain in the river's upper reaches. Numerous sophisticated man-made objects were collected from the Kanda River, an urban waterway. Among them were lenses from smartphones and mobile phones. I modified these into microscopes to observe the microscopic environment of the Kanda River.

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Summer moon, silent shadows gather and play

The haiku poet Matsuo Bashō, known for his work The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1702), is said to have spent four years in his mid-thirties (1677–1680) working on the repair and management of the Kanda Aqueduct.
However, no haiku in which Bashō is said to have written about the Kanda Aqueduct have been found, and practical microscopes had not yet been introduced during this period. In this work, an LLM was trained on Basho's haiku. Observation images obtained using the Kanda-Josui Microscope were input, and the model was instructed to compose haiku describing this microscopic world.
The verse condenses the minute and the cosmic expanse into a single scene by superimposing the summer moon upon the quiet activities of microorganisms. The moon is also a motif representative of Basho and can be interpreted as a metaphor for the round world visible through the microscope.

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