Radio Nippon

Following an earthquake-triggered tsunami in 2011, the Fukushima nuclear plant suffered meltdown and explosions and all but two of Japan's fifty nuclear reactors were shut down. On December 2012 the government allowed the nuclear reactors to resume operations although the majority of people were against it.

In the interactive installation Radio Nippon, 652 Geiger counters all over Japan are being used to create a radioactivity audio map. These real time readings from each counter are transformed into sine waves which become audible when the user moves the tuner over the respective counter coordinates. Of particular note is the area of Fukushima, in central Japan, still exhibiting dangerous levels of radiation. This data is collected by official government counters and there are strong suspicions amongst the public that it misrepresents the true magnitude of the disaster.

The installation has been realized using the free software Processing programming language and the Arduino open source microcontroller.