video, 9 mins
The video forms around a speculative proposal to communicate a material history of Plutonium-238, which makes up the majority of spent nuclear fuel, and has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, through visual images.
PART ONE: Drawing on a history of nuclear power in developing cloud computing infrastructures, alongside paranoid fictions of Uranium glo-sticks in 1990s rave culture, the first part of the video assembles found internet footage as a search for knowledge of such extended temporalities. This structures an absurd search for ‘the Real’, figured through the claims of a 2013 Toyota car ad.
PART TWO: Following the artist’s visit to the HADES laboratory in Mol, Belgium, the second part of the video traces isotopes in waste through its long-term storage and anticipated futures – splitting to four futures modelled in different ways: according to clay absorption; scenario planning; real time observation and demonological contagion - these unfold simultaneously against a default Mac desktop background as icon of the cosmic.
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The work has been shown - as part of an installation of Andy Weir's work at Perpetual Uncertainty: Contemporary Art and the Nuclear Anthropocene, Umea Art Museum, Nov 2016 - April 2017.
- as part of the Arts Catalyst 'Nuclear Art and Archives: Artists' Film' event at Dundee Contemporary Arts, April 2017.
https://www.dca.org.uk/whats-on/event/nuclear-art-and-archives
- at the event 'Digital Ecologies and the Anthropocene' at Bath Spa University, curated by Charlie Tweed, April 2017.
https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/schools/liberal-arts/research/centre-for-media-research/previous-symposiums/digital-ecologies-and-the-anthropocene/
- Part One was shown at 'Anywhere and Elsewhere: Art at the outermost limits of location-specificity' 1st Biennial Conference of Project Anywhere, New School, New York, November 2014, published with text in Anywhere v.1
https://issuu.com/projectanywhere/docs/anywhere_v1_pages
images: stills from site visit to HADES lab, stills from the video; installed on monitor as part of work at Perpetual Uncertainty: Contemporary Art and the Nuclear Anthropocene, Umea Art Museum, 2016; screening of Part One as part of talk at Project Anywhere, New School, New York, 2014.