A special type of visual scanning technique was used to capture SAKAMOTO Ryuichi and TAKATANI Shiro’s 2017 installation titled “IS YOUR TIME,” exhibited in the exhibition “Installation Music 2: IS YOUR TIME.” The piece contained a piano from a high school in Natori City, Miyagi Prefecture that was hit by a tsunami during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake disaster. Photography of the piano was carried out in the ICC exhibition room during the exhibition.

When SAKAMOTO Ryuichi encountered the disaster-ravaged piano from Miyagi Prefecture Agriculture High School, he felt that this piano—a type of instrument with which he was deeply familiar—had been transformed by the power of nature, reverted back from a musical instrument into a mere thing. The work IS YOUR TIME created by SAKAMOTO together with TAKATANI Shiro entailed experiments to create musical playback by extracting it from the sounds emitted by the piano, thus enabling physical perceptions of the piano’s sound while also conveying a sense of the world which cannot be sensed in that physical way.

This piano, which was a human-made instrument and (as a type of instrument) a symbol of the modern era, had lost its function as a musical instrument due to the force of nature known as a tsunami. This made a very strong impression on SAKAMOTO as a sort of “musical death.” Ultimately, though, he transformed the impressions conveyed by this instrument which had been immersed in seawater, had lost the ability to produce sound from some of its keys, was too far gone to properly retune, and was left in a state that made repair impossible. SAKAMOTO reinterpreted the piano as an instrument which had been “tuned by the power of nature,” and by utilizing data from earthquakes that have occurred around the world in performances via this instrument, he reincarnated it as a medium for conveying, in experimental fashion, novel media based on the earth’s rumblings.

Objects that were once mere things or materials are created through the formative efforts of human hands, but the passage of time as well as the tremendous forces of nature eventually revert them back into their original forms.
Cities are no exception: whether it be steel, glass or concrete, each material used to make a city originally comes from natural materials. People gather these materials from all corners of the earth and sculpt them into cities. These, too, eventually return to their original materials with the passage of time.

I live in Manhattan myself, and every time I gaze out at the cityscape, I find it hard to forget this reality. Lately, though, I think that perhaps such musings are not simply my own, personal delusions.