午夜剧场

On November 28, 2022, a large and vibrant wall art piece was completed on the entire wall just to the right of the main entrance on the first floor of Building 34 at Yagami Campus. It was created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the relocation to Yagami Campus, depicting a vision of the future 50 years from now.

This wall art project was proposed as a way to do something interesting and characteristic of the Faculty of Science and Technology to leave behind for future generations. An executive committee was formed, and the project proceeded by recruiting participants from the Yagami Campus community through announcements at faculty meetings, Slack, keio.jp, and other channels.

On September 25 last year, on a sunny afternoon bustling with the Yagami Festival, a workshop for creating the wall art was held, attended by about 40 people. The participants were an international group spanning a wide range of ages, primarily students, faculty, and staff, as well as their families and international students, divided into four groups.

Under the guidance of a coordinator, various group activities were conducted, and information was shared with everyone through presentations between groups. Workbenches were prepared with crafting supplies such as drawing paper, colorful sticky notes, glue, scissors, crayons, and colored paper.

The session began with a mental warm-up where participants closed their eyes and drew random lines on paper to see what shapes emerged. This was followed by exercises in expressing thoughts through art, such as a quiz where groups expressed assigned themes through their work for others to guess.

Moving into the main topic, participants expanded their vision of the future campus by writing down things associated with keywords like "university," "50 years later," "living environment," "transportation," and "food" on sticky notes and pasting them onto large sheets of paper. Furthermore, they specifically imagined the people who would be there—their nationalities, names, appearances, hobbies, research topics, and future dreams—freely expanding on their ideas of "how things should be." Finally, each participant expressed their ideal future campus through their own work and shared it with the group.

Based on the thoughts and feelings of these workshop participants, this wall art was later brought to life by professional artists.

This piece is filled with the energetic and colorful dreams of us residents of Yagami. Growing treehouses, commuting by drone, future makeup, hybrid concerts, space elevators, interactions with extraterrestrials, and more. We invite you to take a close look at the actual piece to see what stories are hidden within, how many people and animals are depicted, and even the details drawn on the wall's light switches.

What kind of impressions will people have when they see this wall art in the year 2072?

(Sachiko Takamine, General Affairs Division, Faculty of Science and Technology)