2025-
Special thanks to: Nirit Binyamini Ben-Meir, Haoran Hong, Prof. Hill Hiroki Kobayashi
Source:
– Sound: Radioactive Live Soundscape Project
– Image dataset: COCO2017 (Microsoft COCO / COCO Consortium)
Radioactive Live Soundscape is a project led by Hiroki Kobayashi Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, ongoing since 2016. It involves the installation of a station for recording and transmitting environmental sounds within the difficult-to-return zone affected by radioactive contamination following the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident in 2011. Environmental sound data has been continuously collected and live-streamed since then.
In October 2025, I had the opportunity to visit the station. During the visit, I encountered cows that had once been livestock and are now living in a semi-feral state. I filmed them from inside a car.
Although they exist in an extremely exceptional environment, the cows were simply cows. I found myself thinking about the fate of these cows, and of cows in general.
Common Objects in Context (COCO) is a large-scale image dataset widely used for computer vision tasks such as object detection, and it contains several thousand images labeled as “cow.” From this dataset, I developed an algorithm that selects images containing cows whose posture and appearance most closely resemble those of the cows captured in my video, and displays them alongside the footage. The video is accompanied by environmental sound data recorded at the same time as the filming.
Exhibition view at “Ripples of Care”, Brompton Cemetery Chapel