“Japan Tsunami Anniversary” takes its name from the short commemorative article that appeared in my local newspaper, The News and Record, on March 11, 2012. In this piece audio becomes a vessel for meditation on information, transmission, and emotional distance, specifically through the lens of the devastating earthquake that hit Japan just over 18 months ago.
As a ritual of remembrance in the
style of “Lectio Divina” (divine reading), on March 11, 2012, I contemplatively
read the article “Japan Tsunami Anniversary,” yet could not transcend my
distraction from the surrounding headlines, advertisements, images, navigation
menus, animated gifs, etc. To give form
to the many layers of visual noise that continuously flood our vision (which
arguably creates a barrier to empathetic connection), I recorded not only the
reading of the article text itself, but also all of the text surrounding the
article, in the same contemplative way. The
arguably more significant information––the content of the article itself––is overpowered:
one may only pick up an occasional meaningful word such as “earthquake,” “Fukushima,”
and “crisis”. As the sound piece reveals,
by the length of the resulting tracks, reading through the navigation menus and
surrounding headlines of other articles took considerably more time than the
reading of the article itself, suggesting a particular weight of importance. In addition, my voice, when layered upon
itself in the lectio divina style of
reading, becomes almost mechanical, further suggestive of emotional distance
and barriers to empathy.
.
