“Pika” is a blinding flash of light. “Don” is the sound of an explosion. Together, “Pikadon” is an onomatopoeia for nuclear explosion. Such words are common in the Japanese language.
The term Pikadon has fascinated and compelled me. There is a childlike quality in the expression that makes Hiroshima and Nagasaki all the more horrifying. I believe the mushroom cloud images and the documentary record of the aftermath make the bombings the largest scale violence and horror we can imagine. The events rest on the liminal edge of what Tim Morton calls hyper-object.
Kuroda has traveled the world for many years calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Like Buckminster Fuller, his vision is to take the destructive power of weaponry and channel it instead to livingry. For him, Pikadon means appropriating the immense negative power of the mushroom cloud and turning it upside down. The new shape created is a vessel, a vase, in which the seed of life can grow anew.
Kuroda Seitaro appropriates the term to symbolise the creative collision of paint and sound of his live painting project PIKADON. In October 2005, he gathered Bill Laswell, John Zorn, Toshiro Kazunori, and other friends for a performance at The Kitchen in New York City.
Ticket and auction proceeds from the two large scale paintings produced during the show went to U.N.I.C.E.F.
In collaboration with Kuroda, I created a multi-camera live image processing event designed to emphasize this transmutation of energy. As Kuroda moved his brushes to the sounds from the musicians, the video footage displayed on large monitors on stage warped and transformed to the music. As Kuroda reworked parts of the painting obscuring his previous images with fresh paint, the monitors reminded the viewers of the forgotten past. Subconsciously, I wanted to remind the viewers not to forget. Rather the traumatic reliving of tragedy, however, I used image processing to make tangible the new energy created by the collision of sound and image.
In another iteration of the same concept, Kuroda and I collaborated with musicians to create these animations.