viz. - Nuclear

War Games - Isao Hashimoto

Michael Widner — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:30:00 +0000

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto

Originally created in 2003 by the Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, "1945-1998" maps all 2053 nuclear explosions during that period.

A Wired article from the time quotes Hashimoto as saying he wanted to show "the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." The increasing pace of tests culminates in a global frenzy of explosions. Each nation's tests have a different color and sound associated with them. The effect is oddly beautiful and reminiscent of an early video game. Even the counters for each nation look like scores.

Hashimoto states that he chose lights and sounds to provide "equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier," yet the clear association with video games also invokes a chilling disconnect between form and content. While appreciating the abstract beauty of the map, we also consider the horror of mass destruction displayed in such a seemingly trivial form. It reminds me of another cautionary work in the war-as-video-game genre:

Austin's Nuclear Family

ebfrye — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 02:27:31 +0000

Image Credit: screenshot from Target Austin, via TAMI

H/T: Dr. Randi Cox, Stephen F. Austin State

Recently I attended the Cold War Cultures conference here at UT and had the pleasure of attending several especially provocative panels. Of particular interest was a talk by Stephen F. Austin State’s Dr. Randi Cox’s on Target Austin, a 1960 PSA film that localizes the threat of nuclear war by imagining an attack on the Texas capital.

Rather than reaching a wide, national audience with general scenarios, the film makes the fear of nuclear war more palpable to a specific audience by employing well-known local personas and footage of immediately recognizable locations.

A shot of the UT campus included in the film’s opening:

A image of the popular swimming hole, Barton Springs, on the morning of the attack:

This skyline shot that prominently features the UT tower is the last shot before the blast:

Cox points out that the film clearly privileges the white, middle-class family who has access to a private shelter.

In contrast to the above image of the prominently featured mother reading to her daughter, the images below indicate the punishment the film heaps on its single characters. A secretary panics in a public shelter in the basement of a building and an insurance salesman (his professional identity rendered null by nuclear attack) runs to his death outside the city limits after his car breaks down in the Texas Hill Country.

Cox also notes that the film includes no instructions on what to do in such a situation. Rather than provide useful information for an already frightened public, the film exaggerates deeply pervasive fears about nuclear war as well as feelings of inadequacy in anyone who lies outside the piece’s narrowly defined domestic norms.

You can watch the film in its entirety via the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI).

Iranian Nuclear Facility Photo & Interpretation

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:30:08 +0000

This morning I received an automatic update message from Imaging Notes, a remote sensing (satellite imaging) trade magazine. The lead-off story was about one of the alleged nuclear material refining facilities in Iran.

The image, and the annotations provided by a private company, are eerily similar to those Colin Powell used in his February, 2003 speech to the UN when he argued on behalf of the doctrine of pre-emptive war in Iraq. I point all of this out not to question the interpretation of the Iranian image, but simply to point out that as lay-people and citizens, we do not have the means to engage with the arguments presented in such images, but must take or refuse their content based with only our trust or mistrust in the party providing the image to guide us.