100,000 LEDs float down the Tokyo Sumida river like fireflies

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  • May 13, 2012 at 8:16 am

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Tokyo Hotaru festival firefly LEDs floating down Sumida river

Japanese have an affectionate bond to the lampyridae family of insects — that’s fireflies for common folk. For centuries they’ve flocked to waterways to watch aquatic insects light-up the night. Well this ancient habit has now taken a modern twist.

As part of the Tokyo Hotaru (which means firefly in Japanese) festival, 100,000 LED-lit “firefly” orbs, were floated along the Sumida river that runs through central Tokyo and empties into the Tokyo bay. The blue LED lights were made by Panasonic and were powered from a photovoltaic cell and rechargeable battery. Don’t cringe yet, they were recaptured downstream using a net.
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Why we love tech: Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room is the closest you’ll get to floating in space

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  • March 1, 2012 at 2:12 pm

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Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Tate Modern in London

Obsessiveness, repetition and of course dots sum up the incredibly original work of Yayoi Kusama. Aged 82, Kusama came into adolescence while Japan was entering its postwar period and later moved to New York in the 1960s, exhibiting alongside Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, before returning back to her home country in 1973. Kusama didn’t just follow the trends of her time, she created them.

The Japanese artist has been on a creative roll ever since she was a young child incorporating her trademark dots for the first time in a drawing at the age of 10, which as she admitted were part of her first hallucinations.

Even after she self-admitted herself to a mental institution in 1977, Yayoi Kusama continued to work fanatically from a studio near the hospital in Shinjuku, Tokyo even to this day. It’s no wonder she is one of Japan’s most celebrated artists
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