Nuclear Culture is the ultimate fetish for our times. World order has been challenged in its name and geopolitical status seems directly proportional to the number of nukes a nation possesses. The rupture of nature's very building blocks, corrupted during fission process, propels a toxic nuclear exceptionalism and ruptures space and time.
Anytime that radioactive materials come into the world, into the sediments, the water, this human-made process marks the anthropocene while it creates interventions in natural ecological systems, timescales, and configurations of matter. Here there is a globally synchronous signature evident in a uniform dispersal of uranium-235, caesium-137, plutonium and other manifestations that do not occur naturally on earth.
This strange globally unified chaos that arises through memory, archive and practice is also a chaos that vibrates and motivates by the stamp of radio-toxic matter itself. The duration of this particular toxic hyper-object, while not infinite exactly, is without question an unimaginably large timespan never before encountered by institutions of humankind.
Perhaps then, we can take this nuclear-centered, temporal disorder as an ethical call to the present.
With the hopes of addressing the complex relationship between particle accelerator and nuclear culture, I am engaging in an ongoing a series of devices in action and reaction.
As artists continue to take risks between the complicity of nuclear culture and modernity, this work will provoke a reevaluation of the construction of nuclear modernity in terms of scientific ideology, aesthetics, and rhetoric. In addition, the series will aim to reveal complex ways artists deal with nuclear aesthetics, developing new forms of critical language and understanding that can open up political debate; creating more informal space in which the nuclear can be understood.
By creating my own version of a particle accelerator, this work revitalizes the conversation on decommissioned particle accelerators sent by established nuclear states to countries still developing the technology. Here the work dwells on a new definition of what it means to belong to the nuclear age. To be apart of this atomic gift economy is to cement the bonds of belonging to a powerful international community that continues to uphold the standards and limits of these machines in order to manipulate the world in a specific way. The reward for its recipients is their ability to, at home, posses and control such a machine. Their moral justification comes, like their better equipped counter parts, from the modernist imperative: the promise of fundamental knowledge— an argument against state control of equipment and all knowledge at the atomic level.
But what is our relationship to the so-called fundamental knowledge and the equipment that enables its pursuit? what is at stake in the pursuit of fundamental knowledge and how do we wish to shape it or participate in it? how do we create to the claim that scientific research hods the potential of profundity— of insight into the material nature of our very existance?
Is it enough to characterize the technical as embodying the moral, social and the political? And, most importantly, who gets space to participate?
Already we exist in a state where agreements and disagreements about degrees of the physical phenomenon of radiation have significant consequences as they structure global control over the flow of such radioactive materials. A loss of words calls for sudden action, in some cases leaving ethics behind. The implication here is that the toxicity of the present has no ethical horizon beyond which the future could not hold us responsible, could not call us to account.
The long term liabilities need to be addressed beyond institutional life spans, and so we are now forced to look beyond its own ideological frameworks to try and understand the problems as they are created. Can we accomplish some redistribution of agency or responsibility? Perhaps we should explore the consequences of rendering nuclear things exceptional or simply dismantle them as banal.