The tragedy of Hiroshima is widely known. The city bears deep scars from the atomic bombing at the end of World War II. On the site of the explosion stands the Hiroshima Peace Park—a memorial site equipped with numerous monuments and commemorative structures. Each day, thousands of visitors come to this place, whose infrastructure today resembles a somber, tragic kind of theme park. Multilingual guided tours are offered, souvenirs are sold, and various informational screens run continuously. The park is also fully equipped with Wi-Fi.
The park’s digital systems—including tour guides, networks, and tracking devices—largely operate using ultrasonic frequencies. These are inaudible to the human ear but can be captured with specialized microphones. The material for this piece was collected in exactly this way, directly within the park and its immediate surroundings. To render the normally imperceptible ultrasound audible, the recorded material was transposed. This involved a process of translation: the recordings were condensed, analyzed for harmonic structures, slowed down, and sampled. The result is an uncanny composition, created by layering the ultrasonic elements with the original sounds, now slowed and stretched.
Without the events of 1945, this extensive infrastructure—where many processes unfold unnoticed—would not exist. The context of the location is therefore essential to the composition. In a sense, the work “plays” with the remnants of the catastrophe from seventy-five years ago—radiation that is no longer perceptible today, yet has transformed into other forms. This process, in which energy is converted and reorganized into new structures, can be understood through the concept of entropy: everything disintegrates and dissolves into chaos.
Kutin | Kindlinger 