date
Notes from ARCUS, Japan
Knots of the Moirai
Landscape as a storytelling tool
Materiality → Memory → Myth
Knots of the Moirai
Landscape as a storytelling tool
Materiality → Memory → Myth
< work in progress >
23/O7/2O26
31/11/2O25
2O/11/2O24
2O/11/2O24
31/11/2O25
2O/11/2O24
2O/11/2O24
Notes from ARCUS, Japan
We meet on the street and as we shake hands, he looks up with suspicion – “where is that going?” There is a plane heading East. He is quick to check the flight radar, it’s a Chinese flight heading over Belarus to it’s destination. Political alliances imply shorter flight times.
The borderland between East and West Europe finds ways to remind us of itself. I become aware of the sky, I look at it in search for answers, drawing conclusions with a lack of knowledge, projecting fears and clichés. Observation implies the observer and the observed. I feel like both.
In an attempt to step away from my own heavily charged observations of the sky, I find myself in ARCUS Projects, in a research artist-in-residency program in Moriya, Ibaraki.
The skies in Japan are a beautiful pale grey in the late weeks of June. The color is rather flat and reminds me of a light-box display. The sun raises and sets suspiciously early. The grayness fluctuates, but persists throughout the day, as the skies of Tokyo look bright even during the night.
This grayness draws me, I find it particularly beautiful in the context of the city with its own shades of grey in buildings, pavements, transportation. Grey is good, grey means no sun, grey means relatively low temperatures. I am not familiar with this relationship to grey, but I happily accept it.
When it rains, it also feels flat, like a light shower or the type of mist they have for fruits and vegetables in supermarkets. The lack of noise, a constant low hum adds to the grey. All is grey, and the consensus is that we like it that way.
Observation implies the observer and the observed. I feel like both. I take the role of the observer as I collect spaces and events in relation to the observations of the sky – traditional, scientific, and political. Mostly I am a lone observer. In other moments, I find myself in company of other observers, as we participate in communal rituals. I am acutely aware of being the observed as well. Holding a camera, pausing to film, writing in public, being a foreigner – all these make me the recipient of the gaze. At times, it also feels like I am the observed of the sky itself.
Tanabata celebrates two stars, the weaver Orihime, daughter of the universe, and cowherd Hikoboshi, who are only allowed to meet once a year on the seventh night of the seventh month in the Milky Way.
I am guided to the Tokyo Daijingu Shrine for a prayer offering on the occasion of the Tanabata. A paper marking is placed around my neck, I get seated in the front row, and watch as two priests and two young women carry out the prayer ceremony. At a certain moment, the priests read out the names of the people gathered today – I listen carefully to hear my own name, pronounced with a short pause followed by surprising accuracy. I am cleansed with bells and given a branch to make a wish. I follow and mimic the actions of the others closely, attempting unsuccessfully to blend in.
A short train ride, a longer bus ride and a quick cable car away, I find the two peaks of Mt Tsukuba decorated with Tanabata wishes, written on colorful pieces of paper, which stand out a bit invasively against the grey skies. The two peaks represent two lovers – similarly like Orihime and Hikoboshi – only these are ancestral deities, said to have conjured the whole of Japan out of the sea. Their love has a tragic ending, reminding me of Orpheus and Eurydice.
With the grey skies, I can see one peak standing on the other, but not much more. I do not see the stars or Tokyo, both I know are laying somewhere in the distance. There are no answers in the grey sky, the naked eye cannot find a place to rest. Perhaps with tools, sensors, telescopes the grayness has meaning.
I visit the Chiba Shrine, where belief systems are layered on top of each other, as a temple becomes a shrine, and as Myōken, a Buddhist deity of the North Star, is replaced with Ame-no-Minakanushi, a Shinto deity, who came into existence when the universe was formed. During the Meiji period, many Buddhist temples became Shinto shrines, but political motives to do alter the human instinct to look up in a search for answers.
It is mid-July when I start looking for other methods of sense-making, transitioning from mythology, religion, storytelling into science and technology. In the meanwhile, the dim cloudy grey skies are replaced by scorching, blinding grey skies – even with the sun, there is no blue.
I find myself once again in Tsukuba, visiting the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Science Museum of Map and Survey. Here, observation is externalized, sent upwards and projected downwards through satellites, telescopes, sensors… The museums allow visitors to play pretend as the observer – people walk over a giant curved map of the Japanese peninsula, take pictures in the costume of an astronaut, and climb up stairs to peak inside a model space ship.
Mt Tsukuba makes another appearance. I trace my hike over a topographical model, laying here right next to Mt Fuji. It is this angle that I felt observed from.
Not too far away from JAXA and the Museum of Map and Survey (I love that those are singular), a rather large and particularly beautiful white balloon is released twice a day in Tsukuba Aerological Observatory and 1,300 other places in the world. Each balloon carries a radiosonde, which collects data for routine aerological observations and, in this way, take a snapshot of the conditions of the entire globe.
Other equipment, most facing the sky, are placed outside or even on the top of the building, exposed to the elements they are sensing. The processing of the collected data happens in a well ventilated office, on a myriad of screens, each showing a different and constantly changing diagram. What quickly becomes clear is that even with thorough explanation, I understand very little about the way that we are making sense of the sky. What does it mean that ozone has to become electricity before we find out how much of it there is in the stratosphere? Infrared lights, transmitters and receivers, levers, lasers, sensors, meters and containers – embodied information is synthesized into familiar formats such as celsius, visibility indexes, and rain probability.
The sky looks notably plain today. I check the weather app to see at what time it is best to cycle to the train station and think of the balloon released earlier this morning to enable my estimates. The balloon and I read the sky, each with our own sensibilities.
The train takes me to the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, which looks even further into the sky. Their visitor center displays telescopes no longer in use and photographs of other universes and comets from mid 1900s. A magnifying glass allows me to see tiny details of the Andromeda Galaxy, or the way it looked when it was captured in 1983. I cannot fully distinguish between stars and scratches on the photographic plate. The two images of comets have a small circular picture on the right bottom corner – a liminal space, perhaps an office, with a large wall clock, perhaps capturing when the image was taken?
I am surprised to find calendars on display here and quickly learn that observatories were and continue to be responsible for calculating and publishing national calendars. The ones I see here are pictorial, meant for those who cannot read. Yet another layer of translation is added to make sense of the sky.
Observation implies the observer and the observed. I feel like both. Between me and the sky I look up to there are layers of tools and metaphors, each developing and mutating with time, which allow a reading to be made. The grey of the Japanese skies seem less flat as these tools and metaphors become more familiar to me, although I do not pretend to fully understand them.