Story of As Long As The Night Lasts
As Long As The Night Lasts
SHINTARO KONO, 2024
The night quietly begins and slowly comes to an end, which expressed through this lighting piece.
With built-in GPS system, the light automatically turns on when the sun sets anywhere on the Earth, goes off from one side as night falls, and turns off at sunrise.
The wavering light will accompany the rhythm of nature, which is difficult to feel in the city, as long as the night lasts.
Year: 2024
Size: H8.5 x W28 x D7cm (approx. H3.3" x W11" x D2.8")
Material: Acrylic board, aluminium, electronic components
About the Work
In the Edo period, a timekeeping system called Futeijihō was used, based on the times of sunset and sunrise.
The day and night were each divided into six equal parts, and temples would ring their bells to signal the hours, allowing townspeople to tell the time.
In other words, people lived with a natural sense of time, where the "speed" of time itself shifted between summer and winter, in harmony with the rhythms of nature.
After the Meiji Restoration, Futeijihō was abolished, and the current fixed-time system—where 24 hours advance at a uniform pace—was adopted. Gradually, the natural rhythms and the daily lives of people began to drift apart.
Today, we live within the uniform, mechanical ticking of standardized time, and have become less attuned to the changing length of days and the subtle shifts of the seasons.
This work quietly accompanies modern life, seeking to awaken—through delicate changes of light—the dialogue with nature once embodied by Futeijihō, and to revive the living, breathing sense of time that people used to feel.
The piece contains an embedded GPS module that measures the latitude and longitude of its location to calculate the exact times of sunset and sunrise.
At sunset, all 24 built-in LEDs illuminate. As the night deepens, they gradually turn off from one side. By midnight, exactly half of them remain lit, and by sunrise, the final LED fades out.
In Tokyo, Japan (approximately 35°N, 139°E), sunset is earliest around 4:30 PM during the winter solstice in December, and latest around 7:00 PM during the summer solstice in June.
Around these solstice periods, the times of sunset and sunrise remain relatively unchanged for about two weeks. In contrast, during the equinoxes in March and September, the times of sunrise and sunset shift by approximately one minute each day.
Interestingly, temperature changes tend to lag behind these solar shifts by about two months, which is why seasonal wardrobe changes often occur in May and November.
Inside the piece, 24 LEDs are arranged in a row. They act as particles of time— a projection device for the phenomenon we call night.
While illuminated, each LED flickers with organic variation, randomly dimming across 4096 levels to create a living, breathing glow.
The division of a day into 24 hours originated in ancient Egypt, a system that has endured through centuries and now reigns as a global social norm.
This work is an attempt to unravel the uniform framework of time, and to rekindle a sense of bodily organicity.
This piece is currently available through made-to-order purchase.
Production begins after your order is placed, and the work will be shipped within 2 to 4 weeks.
You can place your order here.