NEORT++ is pleased to announce "LOCAL NETWORK — Community beyond the place," an exhibition by Crypto Village.

Overview

Many regions across Japan are quietly approaching a threshold.

Declining populations, aging communities, and the loss of locally rooted ways of life — amid these changes, regional communities are finding it increasingly difficult to hold their shape. Yet rather than lamenting the “disappearance” of community, we would like to use this challenge as an occasion to question the very concept of community itself. Is “living in a place” the only thing that defines one’s belonging to it?

Yamakoshi, in Niigata Prefecture, was forced into a full village evacuation following the 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake. Once home to approximately 2,200 residents, the area’s current population has fallen below 700. Tenryukyo, in Nagano Prefecture, has benefited from tourism booms yet has also been buffeted by their tides, and continues to search for a sustainable model of what it means to be a destination. Shiiba Village, deep in the Kyushu Mountains of Miyazaki Prefecture, is known as one of Japan’s most remote and storied places — and the Shiiba Kagura, a ritual performance passed down across generations, now faces the reality of a dwindling number of practitioners.

What these three regions share is not a crisis of “thinning out” as places, but rather a richness of place — a depth of history, memory, ritual, and landscape — that is profoundly their own. The crisis lies in the severing of the circuit through which that richness is passed on to the next generation.

The concept of the “digital villager” emerged as one response to this severance. It is neither migration nor tourism, but a new form of belonging — one in which a relationship with a place is formed through intention and interest. By removing the physical condition of residency, participation in a community becomes open to far more people. At the same time, NFTs become a vessel for that relationship — not as a record of ownership, but as a place that holds the will to be involved.

The Shiiba Kagura NFT, in this context, is far more than a digital archive. It is an attempt to place an intangible culture — one rooted in a specific place — onto a web of relationships that transcends physical distance. In doing so, it shares a fundamentally common question with the digital villager projects of Yamakoshi and Tenryukyo: Can a community exist beyond the boundaries of place, and if so, how far can it reach?

LOCAL NETWORK is both a record of practices gathered around this question, and the question itself — still unfolding. These projects, which paradoxically connect more deeply to place by moving away from it, are not emergency measures against rural decline. They offer, instead, something of a design principle for the communities yet to come.

Planning: Crypto Village
Artist: Hiroyuki Hori
Cooperation: Nishikigoi NFT, Neyaneya Tenryukyo Digital Residents Department, Shiiba Kagura NFT, Okazz, yxkotkx, raf