ORONO, Maine — Each image begins with a flash of white that transitions into a stark photo or film snippet of the horrific damage caused by the first atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, 70 years ago Thursday.
The images of the burned and disfigured residents, the mostly flattened city of 350,000, and the people dispatched to help the injured are projected on black walls as voices — one American and one Japanese — read parts of John Hersey’s 1946 book, “Hiroshima,” an eyewitness account of the immediate aftermath of the bombing.
The Hiroshima audio-visual art installation goes on display at noon Thursday at the University of Maine, and it is one of at least three events around the state scheduled to commemorate the anniversary of the historic bombing.
University of Maine new media artists N.B. Aldrich and John Carney and Maine poet and musician Duane Ingalls collaborated with Japanese sound artist Adachi Tomomi on the project led by Aldrich, who was given Hersey’s book at the age of 12 by his father.
“It’s so incredibly poignant,” Aldrich said Wednesday of Hersey’s book, which tells the horrendous story of the bomb’s aftermath through the eyes of a clerk, a tailor’s widow, a reverend, two doctors and a visiting German priest. “I couldn’t get it out of my head.”
Hersey’s work was originally published in The New Yorker.
The installation incorporates images of the bomb’s devastation taken from historical documentary films that are combined with “a bilingual spoken word composition” to immerse onlookers in the horrific scene that instantly took the lives of an estimated 90,000 people in the city, and claimed the lives of 60,000 more by the following year.
It was the world’s first nuclear attack, but not the last. Three days after Hiroshima, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki with similar devastating effects. On Aug. 15, 1945, the Japanese surrendered, bringing an end to World War II. The official surrender was signed Sept. 2.
The Hiroshima exhibit will be on display from noon to 7 p.m. Thursday through Sunday at UMaine’s Innovative Media Research and Commercialization Center. The center is housed in Stewart Commons, and admission is free.
UMaine’s Masters of Fine Arts in Intermedia program, the IMRC Center and Maine Arts Commission helped to sponsor the exhibit.
Adachi Tomomi was born in 1972 in Kanazawa, Japan, and is versed in multiple forms of art. He is an installation and performance artist, a composer, an instrument builder and a sound poet. He met Aldrich last year and afterward arrived at UMaine from his home in Berlin, Germany, to do some collaborative recordings.
Aldrich of Penobscot is an associate professor in the new media department at UMaine who creates installation, video, performance and acousmatic art. He and Ingalls of Machias are longtime friends who collaborated on a 2004 composition, also called Hiroshima, for the Festival de Arte Sonores in Barcelona, Spain, that was “a textual deconstruction and indexical audio reconstruction” of a portion of Hersey’s book.
Carney, originally from the Providence, Rhode Island, area, who finished his master’s in intermedia at UMaine last year and now is an adjunct professor, provided the video infrastructure for the exhibit.
“It’s a really sad chapter in America’s history,” Carney said Wednesday of the events of 70 years ago.
In addition to doing art, Carney and his wife, Christine, own Thick & Thin Designs, an Orono-based design company that specializes in laser-cut acrylic cupcake toppers.
“I took the entire book of Hersey’s and reduced it down to about four pages and asked Tomomi to translate it,” Aldrich said. “He translated the text to Japanese and sang it. He went to a recording studio and recorded himself reading the text … [and then] he sang it.”
Ingalls read the translated text in English for the UMaine exhibit, and Aldrich took all three recordings and “composed a piece of music — that is the readings,” he said.
The timing of the four-day UMaine art display also is designed to remind people of the history of the atomic bombs, Aldrich said.
“It starts on the anniversary of when the bomb fell on Hiroshima, and it comes down on the day it was dropped on Nagasaki,” the Maine artist said.
Elsewhere, there will be a demonstration with readings from noon to 1 p.m. Thursday at Westmarket Square in Bangor. It will be hosted by members of the Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine to honor those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“On Aug. 6, 1945, about 90,000 people were just vaporized,” said Doug Allen, a founding member of the group and education coordinator.
The explosion was so massive that afterward the bodies of some who died appeared as shadows, so the demonstration includes a ceremonial “die-in” that started about 15 years ago after a similar event was held in Japan.
“We chalk their outlines on the ground. We read a statement from the mayor of Hiroshima, and we have some powerful readings,” Allen said.
The event ends with a peace march through downtown Bangor.
In Portland, “Reflections On The 70th Anniversary Of The Atomic Bombings,” a vigil and spoken word event, is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Monument Square. The event is sponsored by Peace Action Maine, Pax Christi Maine and others.