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Visualizing Fukushima's Landscape of Radiation

Chris Cheung's haunting audiovisual journey, 'RadianceScape' compares radiation levels in Hong Kong to those of Fukushima.
Images courtesy the artists

輻射界 / RadianceScape from XCEED on Vimeo.

Passing through the empty streets of Hong Kong, you spy towers colorful and datafied, mapped with different point cloud-like textures. This is RadianceScape, an audiovisual piece by media artist Chris Cheung, a.k.a. Honhim, that compares the radiation levels of China's super-city to those of Fukushima. As you move through this landscape, it's a whole different ballgame—the closer you get to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the redder the on-screen images become; the radiation levels are soaring.

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RadianceScape made its online debut on March 11, and like The Radiants, a Bortolami Gallery show centered around the topic of radiation, marked the four-year anniversary of the Tōhoku earthquake and its catrastrophic aftermath. "The project is about the data-visualization of the radiation level in Fukushima and in comparison to Hong Kong," Cheung tells The Creators Project. "The visuals were mapped with Google Streetview's hidden depth map APIs, according to the radioactivity," which was taken in real time from Safecast.org. Previously, the haunting, data-based cityscape appeared at the New Vision Arts Festival in Hong Kong, and will soon appear at the FILE Festival in Brazil. With sounds and noises generated from radiation data, the leaking, invisible, inaudible threat that is radiation takes form in RadianceScape.

Big data and art converge in the first installment of our Reform video series, Data Becomes Art In Immersive Visualizations:

Check out Chris Cheung's website for more.

If you also have an awesome project to share, email us: editor@thecreatorsproject.com

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