Nuclear Anthropocene

I will be looking at a selection of artists’ recent moving-image and sound work that deals with ruinscapes and the Nuclear Uncanny (Masco, 2006) specifically in the British landscape; including Emptyset’s Trawsfynydd (2013) made in an ex-nuclear power plant in Snowdonia, Emily Richardson’s Cobra Mist (2008), and Jane and Louise Wilson’s Blind Landing (2012-13) both made at Orford Ness.  These works have an aesthetic which may be deemed a retrofuturistic revival and fetishisation of Cold War aesthetics, but I will explore them as being Hauntological (Reynolds, 2006), and expressive of the ‘psychic anxiety’ (Masco, 2006) surrounding the nuclear and its indeterminacy; as a continuing, haunting presence that has not been resolved, around the seen and the unseen, the invisible becoming visible, the concealed being revealed.  I will explore the concept of Landscape as one that is in flux, but onto which socio-political concerns are projected or inscribed, where spatial manifestations of fear can be seen to form a kind of ‘hauntological topos’  (Riley, 2005). A relationship to fear and uncertainty has been expressed in many recurrent aesthetic forms in tropes of the Gothic, Sublime and the Uncanny (Albano, 2013), where a specific form of landscape that continues to have a contemporary resonance is the military-industrial complex and its ruins (Dillon, 2011).

The paper explores how the Bravo nuclear weapon test in 1954 sparked the emergence of modern concepts of the Earth as a single ecosystem. It describes how this awareness had two primary impacts. First, it led to military strategies of using radioactive fallout as a primary weapon effect of a nuclear attack, allowing the annihilation of entire populations. Secondly, it facilitated the emergence of concepts of a global ecosystem by demonstrating that when massive amounts of radionuclides were generated by a thermonuclear detonation they became distributed throughout the whole system. While 1945 may have been the birth of the anthropocene,1954 was the birth of human awareness of this change.

In public discourse the nuclear usually oscillates between the uncanny and the sublime, that is, the shockingly close (e.g. radioactive particles inside my body) and the mightily distant (e.g. a nuclear explosion). To designate the middle ground, the " space of care " as the curator of the show Ele Carpenter puts it, and perhaps find a language to speak about the title-giving perpetual uncertainty that governs this space, is the objective that was set for this exhibition. If we want to better understand the nuclear condition that we are all part of, we also need to address political, social, aesthetic questions, because science doesn't have all the answers

Chornobyl/Chernobyl/Charnobyl has a symbolic meaning for several generations of east Europeans. It is a city that experienced a disastrous nuclear explosion in 1986 that bequeathed a post-apocalyptic landscape and an eloquent demonstration of the Anthropocene. The epistemological crisis for humanity provoked by the Chornobyl nuclear disaster led to the emergence of post-Chornobyl art, an art of acceptance and denial, an art of physical and emotional trauma, an art that symbolized humanity's responsibility for the future. This paper focuses on art works produced in the first two decades after the explosion at the Chornobyl nuclear plant. The range of art pieces examined in this paper is diverse, from representational art to conceptual installations. The article is an attempt to analyze the trend of post-Chornobyl art created by witnesses of the tragedy. They are Belarusian and Ukrainian artists for whom Chornobyl epitomizes the point of non-return, the overwhelming tragedy of their people, and the devastation of their land; and for whom Chornobyl is an inverted metaphor of the legitimacy of peaceful atom and the results of the Anthropocene. The paper employs Griselda Pollock's theoretical approach to trauma and focuses on the art of the maternal created by artists of both genders.

The Anthropocene is a polyvocal term referring to a wide range of concepts, some of which  remain under construction. This dissertation does not refer to the usual meaning of the word, as  adopted by the academic circles of social sciences and humanities, but rather focuses on its  original signification within natural sciences, namely: (i) as a change of state in the Earth System  and (ii) as a potentially new Geological Time Unit. In contrast to the ideal of value-free objectivity  implied by the dominant scientific discourse, the aim of this research is to comprehend how both  conceptions are underpinned by a multitude of values, both explicitly and subtly.

A central theme of the text is an examination of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), which,  as of 2009, has been responsible for gathering empirical evidence in support of an eventual  formalization of the Anthropocene in the International Chronostratigraphic Chart. First, it is shown that the conformation of the group was explicitly guided by “utility”, a common epistemic  value in the stratigraphic community. In this case, however, it has since been transmuted into a  social, ecological and legal value. This axiological shift is discernible after revealing the sociohistorical linkage between the group and the recently constituted Earth System Science (ESS), wherein the term was first conceptualized and popularized from 2000 onwards.  Understanding the underlying axiology of the Anthropocene, therefore, requires a reconstruction  of its intellectual history. Second, alternative to the internalist, teleological and positivist  historiography prevailing in scientific literature, it is demonstrated how the Anthropocene was an  instance conditioned by the historical context of the second half of the 20th century, where the
dangers of global change, modern ecologism, the internationalization of science, space exploration and advancements in computational technologies gave rise to a new object of study  and intervention: the Earth System.

The history of the Anthropocene conceptualization is then contrasted with a historical alternative  derived from the 19th century. In 1873, the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani first conceived of  a geological era he denominated as “Anthropozoic”—this proposal subsequently being forgotten  in the mid-twentieth century. The comparative reconsideration of his work reveals the implicit  role of contextual values in both scientific formulations, entailing a set of background  assumptions which need to be foreseen and taken into account. The entire process carried out in  this dissertation can thus be understood through the framework I have formulated herein of  “Historical Axiology”: an integrative approach between philosophy and history of science, where  the former provides the abstract vehicle of the historical narrative, while the latter allows for a situated reflection on the values present in our contemporary concerns.