Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Atomic Guitars, Played by Decaying Atoms

It is a visual and "performing" (sort of) art piece by Fuyuki Yamakawa.



From LRB Blog (5/8/2012):

Two canary yellow stratocasters, mounted on stands to face each other and wired into squat black amps, buzz with a tentative open string drone. Next to the guitars hangs the shell of a radiation-proof suit. The stage is set for a band that never arrives: Fuyuki Yamakawa’s Atomic Guitars – recently on display at the Tokyo Art Fair – are played by decaying atoms.

At the base of each guitar is a Geiger counter and a pot of radioactive soil. The counters are plugged into tactile transducers – sound-to-movement converters most often used in home cinemas – that shake the guitars whenever the counters click, making the strings vibrate. The first time Yamakawa exhibited Atomic Guitars he used soil taken from the grounds of the Tokyo National University of the Arts in Toride, a small city 118 miles away from the burnt-out reactors of Fukushima Daiichi. For the Tokyo Fair he took soil from the Imperial Gardens. Radiation doesn’t stay still, it follows the weather. Yamakawa’s guitars are the same colour as the yellow rain that reportedly fell in Tokyo a couple of days after the Fukushima meltdown.

(Full article at the link)


(H/T John Noah)

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow ! incredible, that's beyond art man..

Anonymous said...

a tune for doom

Anonymous said...

Fukushima blues

Anonymous said...

Now you have a taste of what hell sounds like....

Remember the webcam of the tepco employee/contractor pointing his finger at the camera?

Should be on the wall behind these guitars.

Anonymous said...

This also reminds me of the gamma ray camera photos that TEPCO took early on in the accident last year, inside the reactor buildings. I feel a presence of something evil and deadly.

Anonymous said...

They should tune one of them down to a drop D and also could go on tour with some Chernobyl soil samples too, get a right sound going then.

arevamirpal::laprimavera said...

Someone should improv on these sounds. Wonder what Jimi Hendrix would have played..

Anonymous said...

What a fantastic way to make a message with your art! Very cool.

Anonymous said...

Hot Particles and Measurement of Radioactivity

http://www.fairewinds.com/content/hot-particles-and-measurement-radioactivity

Anonymous said...

"More than 1,300 tubes that carry radioactive water inside the San Onofre nuclear plant in Southern California are so damaged that they will be taken out of service"

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/site/?pageid=event_desc&edis_id=NC-20120509-35101-USA

Anonymous said...

May 4 Press Conference On Fukushima By Physicians For Social Responsibility : It'sBad, Very Bad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMfMJQ6IHyY

Anonymous said...

For those who are linking OT topics (not related to atomic guitars), please mark your comment with OT. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

OT

Oops! Sorry.

Anonymous said...

The science behind this is really cool. I have to take issue with the original article's

"Yamakawa’s guitars are the same colour as the yellow rain that reportedly fell in Tokyo a couple of days after the Fukushima meltdown."

As a fellow sufferer of Kafunsho (Japanese cedar pollen hayfever) and resident of Chiba/ Tokyo, Japan I can attest that this "Yellow rain" has nothing to do with the Fukushima tragety- it happens every year. Obvious hyperbole like this doesn't help the cause at all.

Maju said...

Dada-Zen?

I like it but I really understand if you do not. Sometimes resemble some inspired rock mini-solos, at other moments is like random drops hitting various bells. Quite curious, thanks.

Chibaguy said...

@ex skf, Hendrix would play crosstown traffic. That is the nuke industry in a whole but we need bigger trucks to see the tire tracks.

@anon 1:51, would black rain better suit you? I can attest to the black crap all over Chiba and I have evidence not just an opinion.

Anonymous said...

Black rain isn't literally black. Black refers to the tainted aspect of it.

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