Since time immemorial, people have held a rich imagination towards megaliths. The stone circles of the British Isles and Sri Lanka's Sigiriya are emblematic examples. In Japan too, a custom existed of venerating abstractly shaped rocks called iwasaka as divine objects, which is said to be the origin of Shinto.

 　As civilisation progressed, writing was invented. Consequently, inscriptions began to be carved onto megaliths. It is from this moment that we consider the monolith to have been born, through the information imprinted upon the supernatural rock. The Rosetta Stone and the Code of Hammurabi are the most outstanding examples of this. Their flat, elongated shape and surfaces entirely covered in writing convey to us something beyond the information inscribed. However, the Hamadab Stele from the Kingdom of Kush (present-day Sudan) is particularly noteworthy. The Hamadab Stele consists of a lower section of rough, unworked rock, while its upper section is overwhelmingly covered in intricate hieroglyphs. One might say it harbours the mystical energy of the rock striving to become a monolith.

 　Thousands of years later, the advent of stone slab monoliths and the spread of books led to a decline in carving information onto stone. Books are portable and reproducible. Consequently, information and spiritual power became separated. However, for certain types of information, the loss of spiritual power was problematic. The most representative example of this is the sacred scripture. Many religions have supplemented this sacredness through art, such as religious paintings and idols. Islam, however, which forbids idols, could not express sacredness through such means. Therefore, it deliberately established a single sacred place in the world and made it obligatory to pray five times a day facing that direction. That sacred place is the Kaaba in Mecca. Since the information and spiritual power that a scripture should possess were divided between the Qur'an and the Kaaba, the Kaaba had to be a monolith. Ideally, a single black stone would have been preferred, but as the black stone was only about 30cm in size, the structure had to be built by stacking stones. Therefore, it is likely that the entire cube was covered with the Kiswa (black cloth), designed so that the black stone would not be visible. Religious cave architecture that evolved independently in remote regions, such as the cave churches of Ethiopia and the cave temples of Ellora, can also be regarded as transformed cube-shaped monoliths.

 　As time passed further, the Industrial Revolution brought the invention of machinery. Our forebears predicted that information too would accumulate within machines. The monolith appearing in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey embodied the monolith of such an era. For many people today, the first thing that springs to mind upon hearing the word “monolith” is surely that black, inorganic object. That monolith no longer holds information externally. Only upon contact does it impart knowledge. It could be described as the coldest monolith in human history.

 　Today, vast quantities of information are accumulated within machines in the form of databases. What distinguishes this from stone tablet or cube-shaped information is the layering of time, spanning from past to present. This means it is possible to embody information possessing the concept of time as a monolith. We believe there is a growing need for monoliths that allow us to perceive this three-dimensional information more intuitively. We have named this the Kairolith (Kairo (time) + lith (stone)). It is a three-dimensional vessel for information that characterises a specific point through physical conditions, around which various interconnected phenomena gather magnetically. This is the most lucid embodiment of hypercontextualism.


【 Method of Contextual Reception 】
 　1. Create an aggregate by mixing together, as comprehensively as possible, the primordial elements generating the site's context (soil, stone, plants, etc.) and analogous materials (gravel, straw, fibres, etc.).
 　2. Layer man-made materials influenced by these contextual elements (iron, fabric, chemicals, etc.) in frequently occurring forms, following the textures manifested on the aggregate's surface.