Fukushima Abstractions: Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars as Analog Data Visualization

In the past decade, the immense scale of data has shifted our epistemological foundation. Big data's rhetoric claims to access a data set of worldly information so vast that it can present us with reality itself. It may therefore seem counterintuitive that big data reaches us most often in the ubiquitous and highly abstracted form of the "data visualization." If the scale of big data increasingly exceeds our capacity to imagine it, data visualization offers clear meaning at a glance. This means that today's miniature, often endlessly looping, data visualizations operate as an emblematic epistemological form that conjoins the contradictions of temporal immediacy and informational magnitude that characterize our present relationship to knowledge. Today's data visualizations not only present information but negotiate scales of perception for human subjects living under digital magnitude.

While big data and data visualization have been taken up with gusto within communications, media studies, and the newly formed data sciences, their epistemological impact has been considered very little by documentary studies. I argue that two symptomatic trends signal a monumental shift in documentary's epistemological foundations in the age of big data: first, the data visualization, which is becoming the most pervasive (and overlooked) popular documentary form today, and second, first-hand phenomenological experience in the form of human witness and touch as guarantor of truth. Documentary representations of the nuclear explosion represent a singular collision of these two documentary modes. In its representations, the effects of invisible nuclear radiation are both endlessly quantified via data visualization and repeatedly articulated through first-person accounts of proximity.

Isao Hashimoto's 1945–1998 (2003) is what we usually think of as data visualization. It depicts every nuclear explosion—tests, accidents, and wartime detonations—across a global map over a forty-year period. It's easy to read, its red and blue lights appearing and growing in places as explosions accrue. Using readily recognizable forms of scientific and geographic abstraction, it concisely shows us the magnitude of repeated nuclear tests on a global scale over extended time.

However, this essay focuses on what might seem to be an unusual form of either documentary or data visualization, Tomonari Nishikawa's sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2014). A two-minute abstract experimental 35mm film, sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars visualizes the radioactive contamination that lingers in the soil post-2011 Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown. This film operates as a form of what I call "analog data visualization," a documentary form that crystallizes the intersection between our increasing faith in the perspectives offered by big data and a renewed faith in the guarantees of immediate fleshy materiality. In Nishikawa's sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars, the filmmaker buried one hundred feet of 35mm film for six hours in the dirt, a mere twelve miles from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which melted down in the wake of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami. Once an evacuation zone, this area has since been deemed uninhabitable. The glowing abstract blues and yellows of Nishikawa's film suggest that while nuclear radiation is invisible to the naked eye, it remains in the elements, invisibly changing our environment. This radiation, seemingly both present in and represented by

Figure 1.

Still frame from Isao Hashimoto, 1945–1998 (2003).

Nishikawa's film, is pervasive, invisible, all around us, and anxiety-producing—much like the experience of digital magnitude itself. It is oddly both a document and an aesthetic abstraction.

The image of Nishikawa's sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars resembles abstract modernist painting, a very different form of abstraction than that suggested by either numbers or scientific data visualizations. News stories about the impact of the Fukushima meltdown have been accompanied by the evidence suggested by vast numbers, which read both as incontrovertibly concrete and as intellectual abstractions. Some of these numbers are more immediately comprehensible than others. The Tohoku earthquake...