The technosphere - ‘The Contemporary world Machine’ in order to operate needs to enclose, separate and appropriate. It needs large forms of human organisations such as a states and in order to rise and function. The enterprise of War is an essential part of this development. The project examines the development, testing and global monitoring of Nuclear weapons as a marker of the Anthropocene as well as technological and social modernity.
It considers the notions of secrecy and nation building that emerged during the cold war and are tied to the atomic. It tries to understand the set of conflictual relations, rhetoric, military and civilian mobilisations and architectures in and around the ‘nuclear’ that have maintained a sense of equilibrium during the cold war, and the non aligned dispersed and reconfigured form of conflict that has emerged after its end. The project is that of the ‘Anti bunker’.
It attempts to undo the narratives of the ‘sublime’ and the ‘unthinkable’ that have worked to mobilise the nuclear industrial complex and normalise its politics. Instead it proposes the uncanny nature of radiation, and contamination as that which confuses and baffles these notions.
It rejects ideas of containment, deflection, and impenetrability that are so endemic to nuclear architecture and discourse and instead proposes to think about the nuclear, its proliferation and its monitoring through notions that emerge from the chain reaction - of arraying, of radiance, of dissemination and of entanglement.
The project explores concepts of deep time and long geological tragectories to discern how the technosphere emerged, is developing and how one can negotiate in this new epoch.
A part of the project was to present the implications of the Nuclear Industrial Complex, through the Project to the scientists operating the IMS The International Monitoring system that has been set up by the CTBTO, the Comprehensive nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, which is loacted at the UN in Vienna. I have documented their work spaces, their instruments and their archives, and obtained measurements that have been sensed from the infra-sound sensors as well as the hydroacoustic devices that have been set up around the world. Through these, whole earth becomes a space for listening.
A planetary listening device. The systems with which we can investigate the planet have continued to grow in their extent and sophistication and quality. We can understand the long range propagation of soundwaves in the atmosphere in a way that we have never done before. We are sensing the entire globe, From inconsistencies in the stratosphere, clouds to gravitational waves, as the sound bounces, refracts, diffracts from various layers of the atmosphere. The sound is not just the event recorded from the sensor, but a sum of the phenomena that the energy traverses
The project aims to render audible and bring into focus a complex dynamic both which is invisible but present all around us