Fireflies have become a rare sight in Japan. Once they used to glow their low light all over the country in the summer time but now they have become an uncommon sight even in rural areas. Last month 100,000 LED lights floated down through Tokyo’s city centre on the Sumida river mimicking a stream of fireflies. This happend on the occasion of the Tokyo Hotaru Festival (Tokyo Firefly Festival) which was first held in 2012 and is intended to revalue the river and its surroundings, similar to what Seoul has done with their prestigious Cheonggyecheon stream renaturation project. The LED lights were sponsored by Panasonic and equipped with solar cells. At the end all of the lights were taken out of the river by using a big net.

(via, photos by Tokyo Hotaru & Mai Suzuki)

Artwork by the two Japanese So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi. It was shown at the exhibition “UTOPIA no OSHIRASE” in Tokyo last month.

“exploring the relationship between machine and art, so kanno and takahiro yamaguchi have created ‘senseless drawing bot’, a self-propelling device on a skateboard that sprays abstract linework on a stretch of wall using a double pendulum. extrapolating the dynamism of modern graffiti forms, the robot takes advantage of the chaotic gestures of the swinging pendulum to create erratic yet organic paint strokes.

featuring a motorized skateboard base, the construction consists of a single arm equipped with a rotary encoder attached to the fulcrum of the pendulum. as the robot moves from side to side, the swinging motion of the arm is amplified through the physics of inertia which is delineated by a quick release of paint from the spray can. the resulting collage of lines is a complex illustration derived from a simple operation.”

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