To Speak About Our Time (2015)

Transcript of Daniel Dugas’ talk given during the AnthropoScene, a semester-long exploration of this new era sponsored by the Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science & Policy and the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Miami with participation by Artists in Residence in the Everglades.

TOP: The Trinity explosion, July 16, 1945; BELOW: The wolf of Hokkaido, the Tasmanian tiger and the Yangtze River dolphin.

The image of the first explosion of an atomic bomb to represent the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch is a dramatic choice. It is a powerful marker that can also remind us that what starts with a bang could also end with a whimper.

When I was first looking into the terminology for geological time scales, eras, periods and epochs, I was trying to visualize the latter part of the scale. Where are we in there? How do we fit in? What is the correlation between us and the bomb, the bomb and our daily life? If I was to transpose the atomic bomb into a in a more modest span of time, I would think that it would be like starting a new day by getting up on the wrong side of the bed, or worse by getting up only to trip on the carpet at the foot of the bed. The optimist in me says that it would only get better from there.

After taking care of this time scale concept, sort of, I started to worry about the implications of using such an image? What does it mean to have an atomic bomb symbolise the beginning of something? The images of the early blasts are still imprinted in our minds. I can still feel their heat and there is still a part of me that wants to run for cover under a desk or a table. The iconic charge of the bomb is still there and its power continues to frighten us all.

The Oomph Factor
There is a reason for everything. And the reason for choosing the atomic bomb as the icon for this epoch is fine. We all agree that it would have been less persuasive to have used an abstract rendition of a medical isotope. If radiation can be used to heat or to heal, it is also a metaphor for death and destruction, and this brings the atomic bomb, as an icon, much closer to the end of the world than the ‘radioactive substances used by health professionals to assist in the diagnosis and healing of certain health conditions.’ But is this the end of the world? Yes and no. For those who are going to disappear, it is. And we have seen countless of disappearances so far. The wolf of Hokkaido left us in 1889, the Tasmanian tiger in 1936, and the Yangtze River dolphin in 2007, among others. And there will be more species disappear from our world in the future.

Although the image shown suggests that the Anthropocene is the end of the world, it is not. Instead, it is a marker for a state of the world. It demonstrates the farthest we can go, the extreme limit of the human experience. The end of the world has a distance and a time frame attached to it. In the Everglades it was the name that the people living in what is now known as Flamingo thought the place should be called. It was about space. For the estimated between 90,000 – 166,000 people who died in the Hiroshima explosion, it was the end of time.

In 2004 I created the installation Nuclear Mickeys with an audio component entitled 666 seconds of hesitation. The sound track was based upon the Robert Oppenheimer “Now I am Become Death” recording.[1] The Nuclear Mickeys were nuclear explosions that got a fashion makeover for easy and safe consumption. I wanted to show how marketing swallows and dilutes meaning, making everything a game. I was fascinated by the silences and hesitations in Oppenheimer’s speech and based the soundtrack on them. The recording is 58 seconds in length; 28 seconds are comprised of silences, hesitations and breathing. I cut out the words and only kept these pauses. For me, these are the real messages, the heaviest messages.

I would like to draw your attention to this time-lapse map of Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto. It spotlights 2053 nuclear explosions that have taken place between 1945 and 1998.[2]

Alternative Symbol: Implosion vs. Explosion
So, we know the exact time and place of the first atomic bomb: July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., Alamogordo, New Mexico. To be exact, the birth of the modern world is the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range (now known as the White Sands Missile Range), and in an ironic twist, owing to the Atari video game burial of 1983, Alamogordo could also be known as a mass grave of our modern world:

This was…a mass burial of unsold video game cartridges, consoles, and computers undertaken by American video game and home computer company Atari, Inc. in 1983. The goods disposed of through the burial were generally believed to have been unsold copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a game which had become one of the biggest commercial failures in video gaming and is often cited as one of the worst video games ever released.[3]

If the bomb is a great source of inspiration and fascination you have to agree that the whole Atari burial thing is quite something as well. And the cherry on the cake goes to the Vice Admiral Blandy, and his wife cutting the Atomic Cake in a 1946 ceremony celebrating the first explosion in a post war era (peacetime). All is a question of perception and attitude.

End of the World Narrative vs. Speed of the World
The great acceleration of human activities that has been happening in the last 60 years has also transformed our perception of the world. But Speed is an interesting word. It means ‘rapidity of movement, quickness, swiftness’, but in old English SPED means ‘success, a successful course; prosperity, riches, wealth; luck; opportunity, advancement.’ [4] We thrive on speed, it is been the foundation of our modern world. And even if everything goes by faster and faster, we believe that everything will be okay. Everything has to be okay for things to go on. And we like things to go on. This message of hope is conveyed in every advertisement, in every slogan: Beyond Petroleum (bp), Make things better (Toyota), Solving Challenges (Halliburton) or Solutions are in our nature (David Suzuki) –all offer visions of optimism and possibilities.

In 2010, we all witnessed the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. For me, it was a watershed moment of great sadness. I was emotionally shaken by what I was seeing. Like many, I stood there powerless, watching the strange image of oil gushing out of a pipe. We were witnessing an endless leak of oil, right in the middle of the so-called Peak Oil period. What followed changed our perception of disaster. I think from that moment, no disaster would be seen the same way.

Two week after the blowout, I listened to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) interview with Dr. Overton, Professor Emeritus at Louisiana State University’s Department of Environmental Science. He spoke of the uncertainty and the scope of the event, noting that it would never be as big as the Exxon Valdez. The doctor talked about the oil spreading over a much longer period of time than the spill from the ill-fated tanker and explained how the effects would be less severe. He went on to compare the situation to a house fire saying that ‘a room might be on fire, but it doesn’t mean that the house is in danger.’ I was shocked to hear something like that. The doctor was actually comparing the oil spill and the Gulf of Mexico to the ‘room’ and the rest of the planet to the ‘house’, talking about the environment as a series of compartments, secluded from one another, with fire doors in between habitats, something like a weekly pill organizer.

And somehow the disaster went away. In mid August President Obama and his daughter Sasha were already swimming for the cameras at Panama City Beach. Normality prevailed.

Less than a year later, on March 11, 2011, we collectively witnessed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The meltdown of three of the plant’s six nuclear reactors was big news for a while, but this too went away. It did not take long for Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, to assure the International Olympic Committee that radiation leaks at the plant were ‘under control’. Eighteen months after the meltdown, the Olympic Committee announced that Tokyo (238 kilometres from Fukushima) would host the 2020 Summer Olympics. And suddenly, rapidly, successfully our planet becomes a house; we can close the Gulf of Mexico door or the Fukushima door and celebrate all that is good in the world. We would like to think that. Unfortunately, last week’s FUKUSHIMA UPDATE revealed that another pool of highly contaminated water was found to be leaking into the sea.[5] According to some, the final clean-up will take 40 years.

The lesson to be learned from both of these disasters is one of attitude and perception. If such disasters can occur so close to us, to them, and everything is fine, then we have to realize that the disasters to come have a serious benchmark to surpass in order to be qualified as worrisome. The earth can take it. She is tough. We’ll close the door or draw the curtains down.

Functions of the artist: Eye witnessing/investigating/reporting/
What can artists do, how can we contribute? Much like the artists sent on explorers’ ships, we can draw or take photographs of what we are seeing as a legacy for the future. Our function will be to document what is out there, but more importantly, we can keep the door open and make sure that the curtain stays up. Wassily Kandinsky said that artists have a responsibility to speak about their time, to speak about the spirit of their age. To paraphrase Roy – the leader of the renegade Nexus-6 Replicants in the movie Blade Runner, I will add that not speaking about our time here, would be like losing tears in the rain. If we take responsibly for something, we acknowledge that we can do something, and to forfeit this opportunity is like losing tears in the rain.

Daniel Dugas
March 4, 2015
University of Miami, FL

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[1] Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds
“We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” Interview with J. Robert Oppenheimer about the Trinity explosion, first broadcast as part of the television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), produced by Fred Freed, NBC White Paper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LmxIptS3cw

[2] A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 by Isao Hashimoto, 2003
About “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.” http://www.ctbto.org/specials/1945-1998-by-isao-hashimoto/

[3] Atari video game burial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

[4] SPEED: Old English sped “success, a successful course; prosperity, riches, wealth; luck; opportunity, advancement,” from Proto-Germanic *spodiz (cognates: Old Saxon spod “success,” Dutch spoed “haste, speed,” Old High German spuot “success,” Old Saxon spodian “to cause to succeed,” Middle Dutch spoeden, Old High German spuoten “to haste”), from PIE *spo-ti-, from root *spe- (1) “to thrive, prosper” (cognates: Sanskrit sphayate “increases,” Latin sperare “to hope,” Old Church Slavonic spechu “endeavor,” Lithuanian speju “to have leisure”).

Meaning “rapidity of movement, quickness, swiftness” emerged in late Old English (at first usually adverbially, in dative plural, as in spedum feran). Meaning “rate of motion or progress” (whether fast or slow) is from c.1200. Meaning “gear of a machine” is attested from 1866. Meaning “methamphetamine, or a related drug,” first attested 1967, from its effect on users.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=speed&allowed_in_frame=0

[5] Fukushima Update nuclear news from japan
FukushimaUpdate.com went online on October 16, 2011. It is dedicated to providing news and information related to the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan. With neither a pro- nor anti-nuclear agenda and no axes to grind, Fukushima Update aims to be a one-stop source for reliable, fact-based reporting about the Fukushima situation.

http://fukushimaupdate.com

Link to Valerie LeBlanc’s talk