CULTIVATING WHEAT ON JAPANESE hillsides is one thing, but producing neon space-age reeds is quite another. Yet on mountain slopes outside Tokio´s k-Museum and on the Mura-N Terrrace in the village of Sakauchi, architect Makoto Sei Watanabe has successfully created “Fiber Wave”, an installation of 150 carbon-fibre rods  tipped with lights. Aiming to “make the wind visible”, Watanabe´s stuning works of art use no electrical or mechanical power. Instead, their movements are determined by whichever way the winds is blowing.

By day, the rods absorb sunlight, at night, it is spontaneously emitted as tiny blue light that dance like a cloud of fireflies beneath the skies. Art was introduced as the other factor to combine with the architecture and landscape. The piece introduced is an environmental sculpture named "Touch of Wind/Fiber Wave" which uses 150 four-meter high carbon fiber rods.

These rods are equipped with solar batteries and luminous diodes on their tips, and usually stand still. However, when the wind blows, they bend gently and sway. The 150 rods sway slowly to the wind in a gentle rhythm as if the wind were blowing through a grassy field. During the night, the luminous diodes, charged by the sunlight during the day, start to blink causing the effect of light swaying in the wind.Most open-air sculptures are made of solid materials and do not move. Even if the sculpture does move, the movement is primarily mechanical such as repeated identical revolutions. However, the movement of this sculpture is not mechanical but rather natural and in step with the wind as if it were a plant blowing in the wind. Although the respective 150 rods move freely of each other, as a whole they possess a certain rhythm. Their movements are relaxing to the people gazing at them.

The concept of making nature more beautiful through coexistence with high technology is also utilized here.

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