薄明 HAKUMEI 2.0

HAKUMEI 2.0

Year: 2024

Location: MAGMA gallery (Tokyo, Japan)

Duration: 34 min audio loop

Medium: 16ch speaker system, reactive FL lighting system

Exhibited: September 13–17, 2024.

HAKUMEI(means faint light, or twilight)2.0 is part of an ongoing series of multichannel audio installations exploring themes of death, the dead, and the unseen threshold between life and afterlife. The project is rooted in my personal reflections on mortality and draws inspiration from Mount Osore in Aomori, a sacred site believed to be a spiritual gateway for the departed.

The series investigates concepts deeply dependent on time and memory: death as experienced from the first-person perspective—forever inaccessible to the living—and music as a temporal form that cannot be fully grasped until it has ended. These themes are approached through immersive sonic environments created using multichannel audio systems installed in completely darkened spaces.

Alongside the release of the sound work bearing the same title, this installation expands music into a tactile, spatial practice—a space in which sound becomes physically and emotionally tangible. In Twilight 2.0, while maintaining the intensity of musical expression, I further pursued acoustic experimentation focused on auditory perception: modulations in sonic imagery, spatialized motion of sound, and the fluid relationship between time and memory as it relates to death and the dead.

Through sculptural and material multichannel sound design, Twilight 2.0 offers a new framework for understanding music—not as a linear composition, but as an embodied, spatial phenomenon. It seeks to present a context where music, death, and memory coexist and resonate within the body of the listener.

Video by Yumiya Saiki