午言

Date: 2011
Media: happening of spraying icons on the streets illegally

Having been living in Moriya for almost three months, I always feel strange, and find difficulty in dealing with the well organized city life. Now I eventually figure out that I am actually living in a virtual world. No one is hanging on the street. With a view to make contribution to my city, I started to build teleports and log out buttons on the streets. Thus, citizens could move from station to mall immediately, and log out to real life anytime if they wished.

Date: 2011~
Project Homepage: http://www.nagashi-nagashi.net/

This project aims at proposing to launch tōrō nagashi (灯籠流し) in the outer space. In coming years, a proposal will be submitted to JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency).

Tōrō nagashi is a traditional Japan ceremony. During the time, people float paper lanterns down a river. It is traditionally believed that the lanterns will guide the spirits of the departed back to the “other world”, where is located at the end of the sea. Its character is strongly attached to the concept of “utopia”. However, this fancy inevitably lost its stand now, after the scientists have shown us the spherical earth. There is no end of the sea. I wonder whether tradition could be transformed or metamorphosed into a contemporary version, thus tries to switch the location of “other world” to the end of the universe. This new version could re-form a physical utopia in our imagination, as well as our physical relation to the ancestors who have passed away. Please see detail in the project’s homepage.

Part of the project - an emotional experiment of launching tōrō nagashi on the Moon.

Date: 2011
Media: happening of serving cookies with programming codes to public
** developed during residency in ARCUS Project, Moriya, Irabaki, Japan

I re-wrote the citizen charter of Moriya in actionscript programming code, which is widely used in developing flash applications, and marked each character or sign on individual cookie. Eight hundreds of cookies were baked with the help of locals, and served to guests in the day of open studio. In my logic, I have executed the program in human body.

Guests were choosing the cookie. Yummy!

Part of the 800 cookies

A children was writing my programming codes on the cookies

Local housewives and their childen were preparing the cookies

Here is the programming code:
package
{

}
}


Date: 2011
Media: happening of throwing stones with xml codes into an abandoned coal mine tunnel
** developed during residency in Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is widely used for abstract representation of arbitrary data structure in programming. I wrote down the scientific data of recent significant earthquakes in xml format, and marked each character or sign on individual stone. Then, I threw the 916 stones into an abandoned coal mine tunnel, Stollenmundloch von Braut, located in Hattingen, Germany. Too many earthquakes have occured recent years. It is enough. If there were any divine being living underground, I just let them know. The data is accorded to the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC). I threw the stones one by one, in order of the xml coding sequence. I had imported data into the underworld.

Here the XML document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<earthquake>
<evt id="0" date="2011-03-11" M="9.0" D="32" reg="HONSHU,JAPAN" NS="38.322" EW="142.369" fatality="28050" />
<evt id="2" date="2010-04-13" M="6.9" D="17" reg="QINGHAI,CHINA" NS="33.224" EW="96.666" fatality="2968" />
<evt id="3" date="2010-02-27" M="8.8" D="35" reg="BIO-BIO,CHILE" NS="-35.909" EW="-72.733" fatality="577" />
<evt id="4" date="2010-01-12" M="7.0" D="13" reg="HAITI" NS="18.443" EW="-72.571" fatality="316000" />
<evt id="5" date="2009-09-30" M="7.6" D="81" reg="SUMATRA,INDONESIA" NS="-0.725" EW="99.856" fatality="1117" />
<evt id="7" date="2009-04-06" M="6.3" D="8.8" reg="ITALY" NS="42.334" EW="13.334" fatality="295" />
<evt id="9" date="2008-05-12" M="7.9" D="19" reg="SICHUAN,CHINA" NS="30.986" EW="103.364" fatality="87587" />
<evt id="10" date="2007-08-15" M="8.0" D="39" reg="PERU" NS="-13.354" EW="-76.509" fatality="514" />
</earthquake>


Key:
date : date of the earthquake occurred

M : M stands for magnitude. Seismologists indicate the size of an earthquake in units of magnitude. Earthquake magnitude is a logarithmic measure of earthquake size. In simple terms, this means that at the same distance from the earthquake, the shaking will be 10 times as large during a magnitude 5 earthquake as during a magnitude 4 earthquake.

D : The depth where the earthquake begins to rupture. This depth may be relative to mean sea-level or the average elevation of the seismic stations which provided arrival-time data for the earthquake location.

reg : Location of the earthquake occurred

NS : Latitude of the earthquake occurred

EW : Longitude of the earthquake occurred

fatality : Recorded number of fatalities (deaths) caused by this earthquake

Date: 2011
Media: Video generated by processing programming, based on a still image. 20 mins Loop / Living turtle
** developed during residency in Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

This work was inspired by the Sun’s orbiting path believed in ancient Chinese cosmology. In the daytime, the sun is carried by a golden bird that flies from the east to west (yang side). After sunset, it is carried by a turtle (or dark fish) that swims from the west back to east in the water beneath the Earth (yin side).

I asked for a turtle as my pet while staying in Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund as artist-in-residency. When it was sleeping at night, I used an electronic sensor to record its breathing rhythm in digital format. The data was then imported into a processing program, where a video was going to be generated. The program logic simple applied the rhythm on a still image.

The still image is a documentary of Ivy Mike detonated on November 1, 1952. Ivy Mike was the codename given to the first United States nuclear test of a hydrogen bomb, in which a major part of the explosive yield came from nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is the power that lies at the heart of the sun. The bomb was detonated on Elugelab Island yielding 10.4 megatons, almost 500 times the one dropped on Nagasaki.

Date: 2011
Media: installation with mixed media
** developed during residency in Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

This work was inspired by an ancient Chinese mythology, which told the harsh situation of living under ten suns. The diagrams put on the floor are the designs of different fusion power reactors. Nuclear fusion is the power that lies at the heart of the sun. For years, scientists have been trying to replicate it on Earth in order to develop a clean and almost limitless source of energy. A man-made fusion bomb, Ivy Mike, had been detonated sucessfully in 1952. However, commercial and controllable power production is still believed to be unlikely before 2050.