One day, I stopped by a store and saw a fluorescent light blinking with a faint sound.
It was as if they were on the verge of dying out, and it made me think about electricity itself.
We, who consume electricity at the flick of a switch, rarely have the opportunity to think about or appreciate power and electricity, but I recalled seeing on the news that there were major problems and barriers to transmitting electricity from western Japan to eastern Japan, which suffered from a massive power shortage after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. This is because the frequency of electricity in Japan is divided into 50 Hz in eastern Japan and 60 Hz in western. When I thought about this again, it did not seem like somebody else's problem to me, as I was born and raised in Kyoto (western Japan) and now live in Tokyo (eastern Japan).

The flicker phenomenon, in which light flashes, is almost the only phenomenon in our daily lives, and I felt it is a message that conveys a danger signal or an alert to the modern society through the medium of lighting fixtures. By creating a work that focuses on flashing lights, I wanted to create an opportunity to reconsider electric power in the context of art, how electric power itself enriches our lives, and how dependent we are on it. Above all, I wanted to rethink the fact that recording sound itself is impossible without electricity.

I began by experimenting how to represent the flicker phenomenon in sound. I tried reconstructing the sound by chopping it finely, creating an effect like a series of hits with an arpeggiator, and so on. In the course of my experiments, I found that by reducing the speed of sound phrases recorded on the looper by half, the sound would flicker like a blinking light, and I decided to compose music using this as material. The noise produced at the same time adds a rough texture to the sound, and because I liked this texture, I adopted a production method using loopers. The original sound materials were all prepared from electric piano sounds since the instrument itself is a product of the infrastructural society.

For the video, I wanted to visualize the sound image with color tones like Emerged Color, but I also wanted the video material itself to be a representation of light through an electrical appliance by filming the LCD display. In addition, by slowing down the playback speed of the material in the same way as sound, I wanted to focus on the micro time axis, which is normally imperceptible. Since the flicker phenomenon can be captured through the lens of a camera, I used flashing lights emitted from a washing machine at home as video material. Flickering light and sound noise are bugs and errors that are usually eliminated, but I tried to find beauty in them through my own aesthetic eye. I hope that through this work, I was able to make people think about electric power, even if only a little.
I also want to present the meaning of decomposing time in today's culture, where time compression has developed and double-speed playback and fast movies have become commonplace. Finally, I would like to note that the work itself, composed of images and sound, is a benefit and a product of a society with a well-developed infrastructure.