Ocean of Stars

sound work for Aoi Sasaki 's video art work,"Ocean of Stars: Refugia in the Anthropocene",2025

This work responds to the Israeli Defense Minister's 2023 description of Palestinians as "human animals." Such language echoes violent histories -"human zoos "at the 1889 Paris Exposition and Nazi Germany's T4 program, which murdered 200,000 disabled people deemed" unworthy of life."Human animals" reflects a mindset behind many Anthropocene crises: seeing others as less than human-objects to control, exploit, and erase. Let us reclaim language-not just as a tool for survival, but to feel deeply into the world, to open our senses, to reconsider how we live in relation to it, and to give form to what arises.As the artist, I have lived experience of psychiatric disability. My expression has been shaped through marginalization and deep relationships with the Indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido, where I live.
In this work, "human animals" are not degraded beings, but beings of hope-fellow travelers on spaceship Earth.Inspired by the Ainu idea Ainu ne no an Ainu ("a truly human being"), I depict human animals as migratory birds seeking Refugia: places of care, resistance, and reconnection.The "ocean of stars" is a metaphor for these Refugia: spaces sustained by the expressive light of conscious, compassionate beings.This refugia is an ecosystem of becoming.
Materials
* NASA public domain footage & audio (Pale Blue Dot, Apollo 11)
*Ainu sacred chant "Chupkawa" by Sakie Yamamichi
*Artist's heartbeat as resistance
*Swans migrating in Nibutani (filmed on iPhone 15)
*Photos of Hokkaido wildlife & Fukushima' s nuclear zone
*Original piano & environmental sounds (waves, cicadas, birds)
*English text & hand-drawn illustrations
All music composed by Aoi Sasaki
sound engineer: Hajime Fukuda