Patriot's New Year Card

Patriot's New Year Card

Work created in 2026/1/2

This work uses AI person-detection to auto-convert webcam footage into a 'New Year's card' with hinomaru and formulaic greetings. It references the New Year's card format used by a populist political party, yet the irony cuts deeper: this design—centered oversized rising sun, vertical text reading 'Respectful New Year's wishes,' imperial era dating, portrait photo—isn't specific to political propaganda but quintessentially typical Japanese New Year's card style itself. Politicians' self-presentation techniques and ordinary citizens' holiday greetings share identical visual grammar. The algorithmic process—surveillance technology automatically embedding individuals into nationalist symbolic systems—exposes the coercive nature of rituals we unconsciously reproduce annually. By democratizing a politician's visual strategy, the work reveals how the boundary between state propaganda and cultural custom has dissolved. The 'patriot's New Year's card' becomes anyone's card, suggesting we're all already performing nationalist identity through our most mundane social obligations. What appears as personal seasonal greeting functions as automated consent to national belonging.