Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea’s two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Isao Hashimoto himself on his ‘1945-1998’:

This piece of work is a bird’s eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world.

It’s ‘only’ a map of the world. For almost a quarter of an hour flashing lights appear on it, accompanied by sound-effects reminiscent of the 8bit-era. And it truly gave me the creeps; much more than the countless videos of nuclear detonations to be found on YouTube. Isao Hashimoto’s piece of art is one of the most haunting testimonies of man’s folly … forcefully posing the question, if we deserve being here at all.