Youngjae Lih
Lecturer in Fine Arts
Hiroshima Art Document 2017
Author
Summary, in English
After the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, a radio station was the first to inform the public about the terrible incident. It was the Tokyo radio which said that “practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death,”
Functioning site-specifically and drawing upon the architectural structure of the building, the installations explore the relationship between sound and space by staging social and spatial interventions. When layering these real-time remote sound materials over the course of the different locations on a centric line from the ground zero. This project pries on an open architecture and the specifics of locality, as a contingent form whose relationship to sound extends well beyond sympathetic approaches to the city. It suggests different ways to understand the fabrication of space through the central lens of sound and architecture which was one of the few buildings that survived the atomic bombing as a strategy for the construction of sound events.
Sound is an structure in itself and it is tied up to the specific space and time. This project aims to bring today’s sounds of Hiroshima city into former Japan bank's building which is one of the few building that survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, 5th of August, 1945.
The artist developed and used a small radio wave transmitters to produce real-time sound from nearby locations. Each location has been chosen by the artist and those were on a concentric line which was at the same distance from the ground zero. Each site/time-specific resource was received by radio receivers on the exhibition site and it was layered simultaneously, thus creating an acoustical map of contemporary Hiroshima.
Installation was accompanied by other audio and artist publication which has materials from the city reconstruction documentations and fictional stroeis after the bombing. Thus taking live ambient sounds from Today’s neighbours in Hiroshima and in return giving back to the site of the bombing which has its own past history.
Six transmitter units had been installed outdoor and one transmitter unit was placed at the exhibition site. While outdoor transmitters bring the sound from contemporary Hiroshima, the one at the exhibition site transmited the indoor sound to the city, thus it is a composition of outdoor sounds and one manipulated song. The song lyrics are about the descendants of Hiroshima bombing victims. It is a very rare song from a South Korean Pop music in the 90's which deals with Hiroshima bombing. This song was modulated, thus the language wouldn’t be that much discernible.
The outdoor sounds was composed by it’s own logic(allocated in different resonance frequency of Human body) which was based on Hiroshima’s tram system. The artist used the time table of the tram station “Fukuro-machi” to construct the soundscape of Hiroshima, as it is an infrastructure of the new city and it proves the reconstruction of the city. These live-streamed sounds from the city emphasize the individuality and the different experiences to not reduce Hiroshima to all the nuclear disaster cases.
Through this sound transmitting installation, the work acts as a channel between the past and the present of Hiroshima city. Also it is going to shed light on the facts that there has been many foreign victims including Korean, American and Dutch war prisoners and soldiers so we can approach this subject in a more humanistic way, not just confined to Japanese issues.
Technically the transmitter works as an illegal pirate radio station under the local regulation, thus it gives an statement indication of what happened later to the survivors of the atomic bombing.
Functioning site-specifically and drawing upon the architectural structure of the building, the installations explore the relationship between sound and space by staging social and spatial interventions. When layering these real-time remote sound materials over the course of the different locations on a centric line from the ground zero. This project pries on an open architecture and the specifics of locality, as a contingent form whose relationship to sound extends well beyond sympathetic approaches to the city. It suggests different ways to understand the fabrication of space through the central lens of sound and architecture which was one of the few buildings that survived the atomic bombing as a strategy for the construction of sound events.
Sound is an structure in itself and it is tied up to the specific space and time. This project aims to bring today’s sounds of Hiroshima city into former Japan bank's building which is one of the few building that survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, 5th of August, 1945.
The artist developed and used a small radio wave transmitters to produce real-time sound from nearby locations. Each location has been chosen by the artist and those were on a concentric line which was at the same distance from the ground zero. Each site/time-specific resource was received by radio receivers on the exhibition site and it was layered simultaneously, thus creating an acoustical map of contemporary Hiroshima.
Installation was accompanied by other audio and artist publication which has materials from the city reconstruction documentations and fictional stroeis after the bombing. Thus taking live ambient sounds from Today’s neighbours in Hiroshima and in return giving back to the site of the bombing which has its own past history.
Six transmitter units had been installed outdoor and one transmitter unit was placed at the exhibition site. While outdoor transmitters bring the sound from contemporary Hiroshima, the one at the exhibition site transmited the indoor sound to the city, thus it is a composition of outdoor sounds and one manipulated song. The song lyrics are about the descendants of Hiroshima bombing victims. It is a very rare song from a South Korean Pop music in the 90's which deals with Hiroshima bombing. This song was modulated, thus the language wouldn’t be that much discernible.
The outdoor sounds was composed by it’s own logic(allocated in different resonance frequency of Human body) which was based on Hiroshima’s tram system. The artist used the time table of the tram station “Fukuro-machi” to construct the soundscape of Hiroshima, as it is an infrastructure of the new city and it proves the reconstruction of the city. These live-streamed sounds from the city emphasize the individuality and the different experiences to not reduce Hiroshima to all the nuclear disaster cases.
Through this sound transmitting installation, the work acts as a channel between the past and the present of Hiroshima city. Also it is going to shed light on the facts that there has been many foreign victims including Korean, American and Dutch war prisoners and soldiers so we can approach this subject in a more humanistic way, not just confined to Japanese issues.
Technically the transmitter works as an illegal pirate radio station under the local regulation, thus it gives an statement indication of what happened later to the survivors of the atomic bombing.
Department/s
- Malmö Art Academy
Publishing year
2017-08-14
Language
English
Links
Document type
Artistic work
Topic
- Visual Arts
Status
Published