When Sakamoto encountered the piano at Miyagi Prefecture Agricultural High School after the school’s devastation by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake tsunami, he interpreted the piano as having been re-tuned by the forces of nature. Sakamoto felt as if the piano were a corpse of an instrument once alive, and reanimated it as a device that expresses earthquakes, or the vibrations of the earth.

When exhibited for the first time at NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] in 2017, five speakers and five LED panels lined both sides of the gallery, and two more speakers stood at the gallery’s front and rear. Music, taken primarily from Sakamoto’s album async, re-arranged for the installation, resounded alongside the piano tones generated using earthquake data collected from around the globe. Light from the 10 LED panels, emitted simultaneously with sound from the 14 speakers, offered an experience of sound as an “object” that moved three-dimensionally in the gallery space. On the occasion of the work’s exhibit in Chengdu in 2023, a basin of water and LED panel displaying snow were also added.

For the presentation of IS YOUR TIME at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the async elements were omitted in consideration of Sakamoto’s will, to exhibit the piano simply with only its sounds being heard. The piano, rendered an object by the forces of nature, without a role or functional ability to play music created by human hands and heart, performs the earth’s rumbling in the interval between sky and ocean.