"Tomonami" was conceived by researcher Alexis André from his work on creativity acceleration.

While exploring ways to enhance artist’s creativity, Alexis André hypothesized that creativity could be explained by two elements. One is the ability to generate new ideas, and the other is the ability to evaluate them. Tomonami was developed with the insight that technology could accelerate the cultivation of these abilities of artists.

Being creative is the combination of two skills.

 The first creations of art using Tomonami begin with researcher Alexis André tapping his own experience as an artist while gaining an understanding of creativity through dialog with an artist. Characteristic features of an artist’s expression are uniquely extracted from the artist’s past work, and then reflected in the form of parameters in the user interface of originally developed software, to provide a space for the artist to explore their creativity.

Understanding artist's creativity and translating it into parameters

The artist explores this space by manipulating the parameters. The artist can use Tomonami to generate ideas in a short period of time (creating choices autonomously), and then use the artist’s own artistic sensibilities and taste to evaluate them and determine whether or not to adopt them. This acceleration of the trial-and-error cycle of the creative process is the core of Tomonami, and leads to new creations that the artists themselves could not have imagined.

The artist explores Tomonami, encountering new ideas.

Through Tomonami, Alexis André aims for artists to acquire new creativity that forms the foundation for the creation of novel artworks.

Tomonami for Yoshita Yukio

Currently, Alexis André is collaborating with Kutani-yaki, traditional Japanese porcelain, artist Yukio Yoshita, working on artwork production using the specially developed system "Tomonami for Yoshita Yukio."

About Yukio Yoshita

The Tomonami operating screen

Tomonami does not have the intricate adjustment flexibility found in commercial design tools. This stems from the philosophy that Tomonami is fundamentally intended to support the creative process and is not a tool for design. Therefore, the generated images do not take into account constraints in the production process.
This is reflected in the actual creative process of Mr. Yukio Yoshita and is also evident in the following comment:

“I knew that the images presented by 'Tomonami' could not be directly incorporated into my work. While being pushed by Tomonami, I was actually seeing different images in my head from the generated images by weaving in interpretations based on my previous experiences”.

Tomonami-generated image and actual piece of Yoshida's work.