This work is created around a French antique radio owned by Foster Mickley. The radio was built in the era when the Eiffel Tower served as a broadcasting antenna, and the work reflects on the people of the 1920s and 1930s, when modern science was rapidly emerging.
At that time, the moon was an even more distant and unreachable celestial body than it is today, and the radio, under its moonlight, became a tool for people to feel connected to the faraway. Voices and music broadcast from around the world filled city nights and the quiet of homes, bringing echoes of distant worlds into daily life. The radio waves, physical phenomena grounded in Maxwell’s electromagnetism, also resonated deeply with the quantum theory developing in the same era. Both the moon we gaze upon and the radio we listen to are presences we can clearly sense yet never fully grasp. It may be precisely this “uncertainty” that expanded people’s imaginations and nurtured a desire to connect with the distant.
The circular images projected onto the kamidana (household altar) were created with the cooperation of Professor Hiroshige Matsuoka and Masaki Takaya of Kyoto University. They are polarized microscope videos of thin sections of a lunar meteorite and stones collected from the Kizu River in Kyoto.
Beneath the fragments of the moon that have endured beyond human time, may we listen to the music once broadcast across the world and quietly resonate with the hearts of those who once gazed upon the same moon.
