This work is installed at the far end of a small room at the back of Gallery Minami.
Visitors put on the headphones connected to a crystal radio placed on the table, and use the detector to tune the receiver by touching its needle to a mineral, searching for faint sounds.
The work was inspired by a written account describing how the artist’s grandfather, who worked at a volcanic research institute in Aso conducting seismic observations in the 1930s, built a radio himself while living in isolation on a mountaintop. Seeking a connection with the outside world, he listened closely to its faint sounds.
For the 2015 exhibition Stance or Distance at the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, the artist collaborated with her father to create this crystal radio, using minerals collected near Los Alamos, New Mexico, a small town in the desert where the artist spent part of her childhood and which developed as a center for the Manhattan Project.
Crystal radios gradually disappeared in the 1940s with the development of components such as germanium diodes. They represent one of the earliest forms of radio technology, receiving AM radio without a power source, using a mineral crystal, a coil, and headphones containing a salt crystal.
In this exhibition, faint voices from interviews conducted by the artist with volunteer staff at Kyoto Art Center about their memories of mud can be heard through the radio.
