Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Death Atlas, Time Lapses

A tip of the hat to my SFAI student Ian for this:



This is Isao Hashimoto time-lapse map of the two thousand fifty three nuclear detonations that took place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998.

The truly eerie beauty of the piece recalls Laurie Anderson's lovely lachrymose descriptions of America's bombing of Baghdad the first time around, as the images slowly unspooled on CNN's livid green night vision video, "It was like fireflies on a summer night, it was like the 4th of July..."

One gets the strange impression the continents themselves are waking into slow awareness and struggling to speak to one another with chimes and lights, eventually rather like that frenetic human organist chattering away at the Mother Ship at the end of Close Encounters. Of course, the spectacle we are witnessing is indeed a kind of conversation, or at any rate the belligerent traded signals of murderous intents, fueled by unawareness and disdaining conversation, signals that might still conversation and awareness altogether.

Do please discard the suggestions I have read on other sites featuring this amazing piece that you skip forward past the slower-moving more widely-paced early detonations -- the poetry demands you actually devote a dozen minutes of your life to the whole melody, and the impact of the whole is altogether shattering. If you really think you're too busy for that, then you're dead already and the piece has nothing to say to you anyway.

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