Intro

This section gathers the notes, trials, and material decisions behind IHD.

The process moved through observation, bureaucracy, and small physical tests.

Each step helped define how the institute thinks, speaks, and appears.

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1. Early Inspiration

This project began with an interest in jōhatsu, the phenomenon in Japan where people quietly step out of their lives.

The idea of vanishing without spectacle stayed with me, not the escape itself, but the silence around it.

I was attracted by the tension between a person’s desire to withdraw and the systems that continue to record them.

This became the seed for imagining an institution that sees disappearance as an administrative category rather than a mystery.

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2. Institutional Logic

Before making objects, I designed how the institute thinks:
its tone, its rules, its symbolic writing system, and the neutral visual discipline shared across every artifact. This stage set the foundation for a world where disappearance is treated like a procedural matter, that is calm, precise, and slightly wrong.​

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3. Administrative Materials

I developed the institute’s physical language:
forms, receipt pads, disappearance requests, ID cards, uniforms, stamps, clipboards, and instruction sheets.
These objects act as the institute’s infrastructure, the small mechanisms that define what is recorded, deleted, or overlooked, and suggesting how easily absence can be normalized through routine tools.

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4. Spatial Prototypes

From the materials, I moved to spatial fragments:

the intake counter, trace archive, disappearance room, and the stations where viewers meet the institution.

These prototypes focus on the atmosphere of an administrative space, ordinary on the surface, unsettling once read closely.

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5. Future Extensions

This project is still growing.

I am developing ways for the institute to operate beyond static objects, through scripted interactions, performance protocols, and distributed traces that appear in everyday space.

The next phase focuses on how IHD encounters people: how someone checks in, how they request erasure, and how the institution responds.

These actions will expand the work into a behavioral and spatial practice rather than a purely visual one. 

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[Download Bibliography and Research Interview]

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