Okay, so now we are having a roundtable discussion which will be introduced and shared by Susan Kelly, Roger Elishan, Mark Erawala and Liam Sprott. Welcome. Okay, so welcome everybody again. I'm Susan Kelly, I'm a colleague of Ellie's from Goldsmiths. I was lucky enough to be here yesterday so it's been really interesting seeing the films at to sort of complexify actually a lot of the discussions we had yesterday. I would, if people are comfortable where they are, that's fine, there's also quite a bit of space around the table. I can't almost see everybody behind pillars, so if you have a question to ask and I can't see you, just dance or shout or something. First I'd like
to introduce our speakers. So on my far left we have Liam Sprott, who is coming from Kingston as opposed to Stockholm, which is what it says on the back of his book. So Liam was born in England and it was the possibility of nuclear war that prompted his parents to move to Hobart in Australia, which he called the end of the earth. Liam studied and researched and taught philosophy at the University of Tasmania and then eventually he moved back to the UK and he's now a researcher and a PhD student at the University of Kingston. Salim's been studying and researching various end-of narratives, including the nuclear narrative. And his recent book that's just come out with Zero
is Nuclear Futurism, The Work of Art in the Age of Remainderless Destruction. Salim is sort of our conversant here. We have two filmmakers from this morning whose work you've seen. So Koso Esham, to my left, is a writer and a theorist and a filmmaker. He's one half of the Ottoleth Group, who were established with Angelica Segar in 2002, nominated for the Turner Prize a few years ago. You might know some of their other work. So the practice of the Ottoleth Group isn't just filmmaking, it's also curating and publishing. They research into owl and visual cultures, a lot of work around moving image archives, and really investigating the sort of idea of the historical promise, I would say,
historical promise of film of modernism and in this instance of nuclear energy so you saw this morning film that was commissioned for documenta in 2012 and the radiant okay and then in the center we have mark Ariel Waller and some mark makes films sculpture installations and produces events he's also interested in archival data historical positioning of culture and the work that you saw this morning, Glow Boys was made in 1999, partly made in the Oldbury and Sizewell reactors, after a year's research, meeting with and discussing with staff at the nuclear plants, which I thought was really interesting, it's not something we talked about yesterday at all, actually the culture of those places as workplaces. Mark has also made a film called
mid-watch in 2001 where interviews with veterans of the first British nuclear weapons tests collide with Melville's Moby Dick in a psychologically charged exchange so that might be one to follow up with and Mark currently lectures at Central St Martins and at Norwich so I think what we're going to do we have about an hour and Liam is going to kick off with a couple of comments and observations about the films not just Kojo and Mark's but also we've seen quite a broad range of films this morning. They will talk among themselves probably for about 20 to 30 minutes and then we'll open up to the room for discussion or debate unless you want to urgently jump in earlier and that will be fine too. Okay, so over to you. Okay, thanks Susan and thanks to Kojo and Mark for the films and all the other artists
and to Kelly for organising everything. But I guess, I mean, my interest and the interest of the book was about time and specifically the problem of the future in the face of these various end-of narratives, specifically the end of history that was so closely tied to the Cold War and that threat of nuclear destruction. And that's what led me to look at the connection between sort of the futurists as an art movement and nuclear weapons, because the futurists were keen on war and on technology, and nuclear weapons are sort of the highest form of war technology that there is. But that was just a way of getting in to explore this question of the future and of temporality.
And what I think is interesting in these films is that sort of temporality that's at work there, and specifically the temporality of the disaster, or the time of the disaster. And so in The Radiant we saw exploring the after effects of this disaster. And I think that's interesting for the way you blend a documentary style of interviews and file footage, etc. and looking at something after, but also in the artistic work of creating something new as well. So there's that connection. But of course, all effects are after effects. And in a way, we're stuck after the disaster already.
We're already there. And I think this is the nuclear workers are already working in this disastrous situation. It's like if they're there, it's like they're getting radiation, that the disaster has already happened, that they're necessary to be there being contaminated in this. The disastrous situation is the nuclear power plant there already. But that, I think, connects up with something that we spoke a lot about yesterday, which was the sort of knowledge and the epistemology connected with this nuclear condition. And not so much our knowledge of what do we know about nuclear science or narratives or whatever, but how the nuclear issue affects what knowledge itself is.
And that's what I would say is the important epistemological question, not what do we know, but how do we know and what is knowledge as a result. And what is it to have disastrous knowledge, or is knowledge itself disastrous? And I think there's an interesting connection with the Blanchot that came in in Jelena Popovic's films, that mentioned the Blanchot there, and that sort of stole my thunder a bit. And what I wonder is this sort of scientific knowledge that allows us to sort of in-depth manipulate the very matter of the world, the very atom itself, if that itself is the disastrous thing,
that the shift in knowledge that allowed the science for us to do that happened long before nuclear weapons were produced, but that is the disaster there. And I think that's interesting because the knowledge that allows us to do that also gives us knowledge of the world that is well beyond the human. And this is sort of something I thought up yesterday where there was discussion of how to dispose of nuclear waste, and in particular this long temporality that you have to deal with this long time. You know, 100,000 years or so was the figure that was quoted. But, you know, when science also tells us that the Earth came together 4.5 billion years ago,
then 100,000 years doesn't seem so long. And I wonder if the knowledge that produced the atom, atomic energy itself, also produces a way of disposing of it because it's that scientific knowledge that gives us this really deep, deep time, much more than the half-life of atomic things. And it's the temporality of the geological itself that will dispose of this. And I found that idea of geological disposal facilities interesting because the geological itself disposes of the problem. If you think in geological time, there isn't a problem. It's much too long for this problem to exist.
And into that, the place of the human is called into question. And I thought this was something interesting in the interview with the nuclear worker where he said that this idea of claiming that you're someone that you're not, and the interesting thing is not, well, who are they? Again, we can flip that around and say if you can claim that you're someone who you're not what does that mean for the very idea of personhood or subjectivity? How important is subjectivity if it can be it can also be disposed of that easily? And I guess this in a way is what I find interesting about the nuclear question is that it is so crazy that we have created this,
that after we created these weapons that can destroy all life on earth, this humongous power source, it's like, where are we left after we have done that? What is our condition in the disaster? And I think something we spoke about before was the way in which divinity has popped into both of your films, the divinity of radiation and the divinity of human mastery. But it makes me think, you know, there is that, I think it's Dostoevsky who says, you know, if God has died, then anything is possible. But maybe we can flip that around and say, you know, in the face of the absolute craziness of the nuclear disaster,
or the disastrousness of nuclear knowledge, it's surely anything is possible after that. In the face, nothing can be as bizarrely crazy as that knowledge. And I think that opens up an interesting space within which art can work. And in that juxtaposition of asking knowledge, What is knowledge? What's the documentary form of that? And what's the creative side of it? And because both of the films played on this, or yours in two parts, the interview and the more, I don't know what you call it, fictional side of it, and the interview side of it,
and they were intertwined in the radiant. And I think there's some interesting things because that documentary form then makes you accept what is said there, but I wonder how much of what's presented as documentary is actually fact, which I think is maybe an interesting question, but that's the space that gets opened up for, and if I was going to go on, I would talk about space as a term there in relation to time that we spoke about earlier. Do you guys want to have a quick response to this? Thank you, Lin. Those are really compelling points you draw. Maybe I could pick up on
the last point you mentioned, which is, say, in the face of the disasters and subnuclear knowledge, then anything is possible. And there's a... In the credits to Glowboys, I notice that the men were credited after their t-shirts. So one guy was credited as the Hulk, another guy was credited as Mr. Fantastic. And so these are names from Fantastic Four, from Marvel Comics. And so, and Marvel Comics, as many people know, were a kind of, you know, a kind of industrial folklore, a folklore of industrial, post-industrial America, of kind of post-war America. And both America and Japan had these mythologies of mutation.
And these mythologies of mutation are ways of managing the kind of matrix of energies that come out of the post-war era. The energies of the atomic, the energies of the psychedelic, the energies of the electronic, all of these emerge in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's kind of cosmologies and mythologies and cosmogenies of the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. And this question of mutation, which I feel Globoys kind of weaves a fabulation around this question of mutation, is compelling to me because it's one of the ideas that also informs the radians.
Eric de Bureen, who's a scholar in Amsterdam, said that the Radiant, the term, even the name the Radiant sounded to him like a superhero. And one of the impulses behind the Radiant was to stress test, was to stress these fantasies fantasies of mutation that we'd grown up with was to test this against an event which promised something like the horror of latent mutation, mutations that would only show up 10, 20, 30 years. So one of the ideas was to test this against its reality. And Mark, maybe
you could talk a bit more about that aspect of the fantasy's mutation, how the characters are somehow both personifying that and commuting on that. Well, like I just said, these characters come from Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four that were transformed through a relation to cosmic rays. But, I mean, something that we were talking about yesterday in one of the groups was the
relationship that we could weave back to Ovid, to the metamorphosis, and how a kind of an ancient mythology is surrounding the idea of metamorphosis or mutation, and that this that this is the kind of, this is the situation of being human, that we will, or being any kind of living organism, that we will change from one form to the other. But, what else do you, what else do you mean in the answer?
I guess it's the idea that at the dimension of fantasy, the nuclear catalyzes permission and possibility, so that what seems rationally and politically to be a question of horror and dread, at the level of fantasy becomes a question of permission and a question of potentiality and a question of the superhuman. So instead of a vision of dread and terror and threat, comics create an inverse fantasy of potency, of strength, of power, of un-glimpsed
sort of capacities. And in your film when those fellows are playing darts, having t-shirts with these Marvel Comics characters becomes a playful comment on that entire post-war fantasy of radiation as an affirmative condition that humans, that these characters can not only survive radiation but can come through transformed. And that then links by kind of dialectically to the entire dimension of Japanese manga and anime from Astro Boy onwards, in
which the traumas of Fukushima and of Nagasaki are transduced into a giant proliferating series of super-powered mutations from Astro Boy to Tetsuo to Akira and onwards. Yeah. I mean, the kind of reason why I chose for these people to be wearing the superhero T-shirts was also it was to do with the time I spent visiting pubs around nuclear reactors. I would stay in pubs where contract workers were staying and playing pool with them and get drunk. And what came out was that they're kind of this very macho kind of identification
that they were a bit like, they thought, I mean, obviously there's difference within, but there was a kind of culture of being like a cowboy, that you would go from one reactor to the other. And that it was... that these guys were... through the kind of job, I suppose, they were unable to have a family as such, because they were always on the move doing these welding jobs. And so it was kind of just as much a kind of parody of their hyper-masculinity that they
would arrive in this mutated form. Would you like to come back in on that? Because in a way what you're talking about is a sort of a pop culture sublimation maybe or fantasy of the disaster. Yeah, and I think that represents something interesting for what is that question of how can art speak to a very technical scientific discourse. And it can do that by ignoring it, in a sense. And it's like the superheroes that, you know, the physics is all messed up. It's not a scientific explanation of... There's a pseudo-scientific explanation
that Spider-Man gets bitten by a radioactive spider. But that's not the truth of the situation. And in a sense, that is what allows art to speak back to the scientific discourse by having a different sort of knowledge. It can just ignore it and say, well, let's experiment on knowledge itself by presenting different sorts of knowledge. And it has the freedom to be able to do that and in that way can not just escape having to try and be constrained by the scientific discourse, but comment back on it and say, hey, what's being presented here is a type of knowledge. Here's another type of knowledge
that will maybe allow us to look at it in a different way. I think after a catastrophe like Fukushima, it's not very difficult to be against nuclear energy. It's very easy to be because it's clear to people how the effects and the implications within Japan and around the world become more evident. What was interesting to us was to was to revisit an earlier moment in which there was a great deal of pride and patriotism in nuclear energy and to understand how Japan, which was an imperialising country, how Japan
became the victims, so how the perpetrators of World War II, one of the perpetrators became the victims of World War II, and then how it was that after the war there was a kind of a concerted effort within Japan to reconstruct itself along scientific lines. So one of the things that the Japanese government took away from World War II was that the science of the enemy was superior, that American science was superior to Japan and Japan had to catch So right at the beginning, science is linked to the reconstruction of Japanese identity, Japanese political identity, and Japanese business. So this is why the film starts with this tete-a-tete between a Japanese businessman and an American businessman.
There you see the two business elites forming an understanding, an understanding which will shape post-war Japanese culture. culture. The American man making a joke, the Japanese man speaking in a more British than British accent and making a joke at his expense. And that shared joke is something like, in that joke is something like the shared understanding of what it will take to reconstruct Japan. Japan's role as a geopolitical partner against China and Japan's shared understanding of American technoscientific knowledge, and it's all there, concentrated in this little joke. And so we needed to understand how it was that Japan had gone from this country that
was bombed twice to having 54 nuclear power plants in a country the size of California with intense seismic activity all along its coastline and indeed through its archipelago. How is that possible? And the way you begin to understand it is that the Japanese government felt more safe the more nuclear power plants it had. Not less safe, more safe. that nuclear power was understood as a form of potency, understood as a form of technoscientific strength. And then the question also was that how was the nation itself involved in this? And this relates to mass climate. As you say, you say that there are pubs that you'd visit
which were close to where people worked. And in Japan, there was not so much pubs based around nuclear centers, there are visitor centers and there are swimming pools. So every municipality that has a nuclear reactor also gains schools and hospitals. It's part of the redevelopment of the kind of hinterlands of Japan. So it's part of regeneration. So there are good reasons why distant parts of northeast Japan would want a power station. And each of these power stations has a VISTA centre, and VISTA centres are geared towards families and towards children. And this means that within VISTA centre,
there's an entire pedagogy of nuclear power, which is designed to introduce and to invite families and children and mothers into the mysteries and the wonders and the kind of the powers of nuclearity. And it's at this point that animation and infantilization becomes crucial because the way you make nuclear power, the way you make chain reactions understandable is to animate them. So, you know, the key elements in change action, uranium, etc., these are animated as playful figures that children can identify with. And these animations are voiced by female voices.
And these are some of the voices you hear at the end of the radiant. So these dimensions of the feminine guide and the kind of childish personification from astrobotons, these become part of the mythology that draws the nation of Japan into a sense of safety. And it was important for us to understand these questions of safety, pride, patriotism, and feeling protected by nuclear power. Because after the fact, it seems impossible. How on earth can you feel protected by nuclear power stations? Isn't it the reverse? Aren't you exposing yourself to danger? But no. It's more important to understand how people feel protected. That's just as important. We try to reconstruct that process.
Is that a good point to Bob and Ed? Yeah, okay, thank you. Immediate responses to a lot of what's been said. It's your turn. Yeah. Okay, I'll say something. Well, I suppose it's a take on this superhero thing. thing because if you I used to work on a nuclear power plant so when you showed that clip at Fukushima where they were lighting the atom you know I was there at Dungeness when they did that I was part of that team and I've worked inside a nuclear reactor with all the airlines and the crap for name and what strikes me about
working on a nuclear power plant is that nothing happens absolutely nothing for year after year after year and the people who do this work are not you know they're professional engineers with their families and nothing happens it is the most boring job you can imagine and then you imagine what it would be like to be that person suddenly faced with a fukushima or a chernobyl and all of a sudden somebody who is you know very quiet life indeed has to become a a superhero and when you read the accounts of what happened at Chernobyl and what people did and the sacrifices they made some of them really did act like superheroes and you get ordinary
people just thinking if I go through that door I'm going to die but somebody has to go through that door and find out what's going on and he went through that door and he came back and told them he told his story and then he died and you know these tragedies are full of acts of heroism in the midst of it. I just think it's another angle on this transformation from banality to superhero. Thank you. It reminds me a little bit of what Paul was saying yesterday about this very particular set of affects of being around the low probability but high impact. What that is, the banality and the absolute disastrousness of that. What that means to live that out
in those places. Yeah, I haven't, it's difficult to have a commentary. you think that the superhero fascination was the sort of sublimation that Koja was talking about or do you think it was more to do with that sort of everydayness that David's talking about, that sort of everyday finality? I mean I think it's also got something to do with
that these people, you know, they were heroes, the ones that died, but they also were workers who were part of an organisation that paid for them to die. So it's quite a... It's a difficult thing to say, because in some ways they could be seen as being sacrificed. They're sacrificial victims, not PEOs. I think that's also a great looking at it. And just to, as an addendum, in a way, for the discussions about science and control
and containment and the notion of science as an accretion of knowledge and that we're looking forward to bigger and better, but of course the negative externalities and the problems that science brings or certain aspects of science, you can distinguish between normal where the risk stakes are not so high and what you could argue to be post-normal science, in other words, stuff where if something does go wrong, there's no problems, high impact risks, and conditions of relative sensitivity, if something does go wrong, you might be able to write up a part of your country. So the notion of science is also, art has, culture has a lot to say about science
and about the hegemony of science, the preeminence of science, and to question that, because of course we're not talking about science as not simply one thing, it's many different things. So in this context, certainly science is contested and disputed as well. I was wondering, Paul, did you have a comment? Because we talked a lot yesterday about knowledge and perception and the uncertainty of science, and I think Liam's brought in this idea of knowledge as something that's dangerous, potentially. which I think was really striking, like how did we come up with this? How did this happen? I'm just wondering your response to that notion of knowledge. Sorry, can you say that? I'm just repeating in a way what Leem started out talking about,
that knowledge is something that's dangerous. Yeah, earlier there were discussions about the distinction between knowledge and reason. Also in terms of the initial creation of the thing, to split it out and the knowledge that does that, in order to do things afterwards, you need vast amounts of resources, vast amounts of political, social, cultural accretions around laboratories, facilities. vast amounts of resources in order to deploy knowledge as well too. And in that sense that's a cultural decision. So you can, what you seem to be pointing to are questions of ethics associated with science perhaps,
and questions of perhaps what you should do and what you shouldn't do. But equally I think it's clearly a problem to think about science as an ever progressive accretion of knowledge, of knowledge and also the notion of science being able to cure the ills of science is also, to be honest, it can be a little naïve. I mean, I could answer this and say, and present the sort of anti-scientist view that would being presented that's in someone like Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher.
But I think that's like the extreme sort of view. But it's, I would say, that idea that science needs resources, I would say the mode of knowledge that science already works in is what allocates the world as resource. So it's already made that fundamental shift in the way the world is understood that things are seen as resources. And this would be Heidegger's point, that you no longer see the mountain as a mountain, you see it as a uranium deposit to dig up. You no longer see the river as the beautiful thing flowing through the valley, you see it as the potential to be damned and turned into electricity. And that it's in science itself that presents the world in a particular way and doesn't
allow another sort of understanding of the world. world. And Heidegger's point, he says, is that the scientific worldview is dangerous, but where that danger is, there grows a saving power. And precisely the saving power he points to is art, because art can show the restrictive nature of knowledge as science, and show the possibility of other understandings. Yes, there's a question here and then down. Yeah, I mean, Heidegger's biography not withstanding.
Sorry. I think there are still some very serious issues and I've come back to something I said yesterday, it seemed as a refrain, which is that knowledge is not science is not technology, looking at a river. So that's why the violent inherent in trying to make a dam or trying to build things is not quite the same. It cannot be conflated entirely unproblematically as science. So for me it's difficult to look at science romantically as well as the flowing beautiful river romantically. I mean that use of that adjectives completely gives you So I think one's got to be really, really careful about this also because technology
doesn't necessarily have direct unproblematic lineages in science, right? It's also got relationships to craft, to techniques, to making things work, to daily life, in a way in which at least by mid to late 19th century and onwards, we've sort of consolidated as, or began to understand this, a certain way of knowing as science, right? And I think, again, I'm not trying to establish a hierarchy between knowing and knowledge and knowledge systems and, you know, other people's blah, blah, blah. I'm not trying to establish a hierarchy as much as I'm calling for precision because the minute you conflate these things, it becomes a problem, I mean, I would have huge problems sort of forwarding that as an example for science,
right? The bomb is, yes, I mean, it is the coming together of big science, of, you know, so everybody was put together by engineers, by chemists, by physicists, by military generals, by political leaders. So the coming together of organizations, as you say, the accretions, you know, society, culture, I mean, it's a collective decision of people often also maybe talking past each but it's coming together with decisions of various kinds. And I think in order to come back to sort of, I don't even remember who, how do you call it? Who put it together in a better phrase than I ever can, which is that for better civic debate, we need to work with sort of better understandings of science, of technology, of knowledge,
of knowledge systems, et cetera. So I think, I'll stop. Do you want to get back on that? Can I just, can I, there was one question here first and then. Just a kind of question or comment about the radio. It felt a bit like a Keeler Robinson film, maybe like Robinson in Fukushima. And it reminded me of that last Robinson in Ruins film where it opens with that quote from Jameson,
where he quotes Jameson saying that it's easier to imagine the ecological destruction of the Earth than the end of global capital. I'm not sure whether the radians speak into that somehow, or there's a sense in which global capital has produced the global destruction of the earth, and of itself through that, maybe, I don't know. Because the way you're counterposing that optimistic, positive archive archive footage of Japan building its nuclear facilities and they ship that down after it. Do you want to take another question or response?
Take another one. He needs to chew up. Okay, I'm an evil scientist, so I'm not an evil scientist. I sort of have difficulty sometimes when you're sort of saying that it's scientists that did this, scientists do that, scientists ruin the world. Well, actually a lot of scientists are trying to protect the world and trying to look after people. And it is, as the speaker said just earlier, it's the society and the political environment actually that sets the direction that a lot of science goes in.
And if you think of where the nuclear weapons came from, there was this will for war. I mean that's not scientists, that's political, that's social, that's the people that we are. I work in health protection, so I'm a radiation protection person, I'm familiar with radiation. I'm in the dark, you know, like everybody else does. And I find this is a very interesting environment, but there are scientists out there trying to protect people. for example in your film when you have the nuclear worker sort of saying I go from site to site well he may be feeling
gung ho about it but I'm sitting there as a radiation protection person saying well I'm going to keep track of how much dose you've got I will give you a passport and that radiation passport you write down exactly how much dose that person gets and as they go from site to site then it's recorded So there are people out there monitoring, people out there trying to protect people from themselves in a sense. I think maybe when you think about your films, you need to think about the presentation of the facts as well as the presentation of everything else. because one, the old criticism is something that people can see
for a long time and especially when you think about the Greenland Common film, that was a record and that would be seen as a documentary of what was going on there so sort of think about the way things are portrayed and think about the film I think she just has one tiny point, is that okay and then a couple of sentences Just a couple of sentences to add. I forgot one word and you can kill me afterwards. This is really not a personal attack on me. I hope you don't misunderstand me. The one word I forgot is capital, of course. When does a river become a potential site for a town? So capital and industrialization are hugely tied into how things become resources. So it's not necessarily only science. But the one sentence I want to add about science is also that, I mean,
I'm not trying to say at the same time that science is not complicit. I mean scientists are also a part of society, as I said yesterday, artists are. Right? So when you look at, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hydrogen bomb came only as late as 1954. And at that point of time people very well knew within the physics community, and within Solofin India, other people working, engineers working with them, that this was potentially an incredibly destructive weapon. But as Taylor and Koolang, or Edward Taylor and Koolang said, this is a sweet problem. So obviously there are, I mean, you know, so, I mean, science is complicit in it, but that doesn't mean it's, you know, kind of, that everything is in the next world. I mean, there are moments when it becomes something, there are moments when it doesn't become something, and getting to that and, you know, holding on to what's specified is probably crucial.
Okay, thank you very much for that answer. Mark? Quite a lot to respond. Yes, thank you very much for your comment. And I totally respect your job. I think it's a very important job to protect the workers that are involved in nuclear establishments. the term glow boys though comes from accounts from co-workers at Three Mile Island in the 1970s so it is a historic thing which I totally agree if you should be put into film it's a very good
thing that filmmakers are giving accounts of the way that people have tried to assert the systems that are set in to protect them. And no doubt people will find ways to break the passport thing. You know, criminals always manage to steal people's credit cards and reprogram phones. You know, there's always ways around systems, especially when there's easy money. So, but, so this is, you know, it's a constant thing, but it probably doesn't happen anymore in the same way as it happened at one point.
But there's always cases of workers who, in emergency situations, have to exceed their stated dosage. like in Fukushima there were accounts from a Tokyo newspaper and it says from the Asahi Shimbun newspaper workers that crippled Fukushima number one nuclear plant were ordered to cover their dosimeters with lead plates to keep radiation doses low enough to continue working under dangerous conditions. Some refused to do this. Others
raised a question about their safety and legality of the practice. But the man in charge, a senior official of the subcontractor of Tokyo Electric Power Company, warned them that they would lose their jobs and any chance of employment at other nuclear plants if they failed to comply. I mean, maybe this didn't happen. The pocket-sized dosimeters sound an alarm when they detect high radiation levels. A worker who has been exposed to the accumulated dose of 50 millisieverts within a year must stop working and stay away from the area for a certain period of time. But obviously they ran out of workers. There weren't thousands of people in order to each go in for a minute to continue the next person's job.
so they had to hide themselves from the regulation by covering the dosimeters. But the question is, should the company really have accounted for dosage and kept their dosimeters going and they broke the rule rather than the contractor breaking the rule? But these are very difficult questions. You've got something from Japan right now with the mic actually. I just wanted to respond just a bit to both the radiation protection lady and to Dan Bia's point. I think the point you raise is a key question for cinema which is responsibility
I think it's a serious question whether cinema is best employed as a medium that conveys facts. At this moment in time, cinema, artist films, artist moving image, has to be understood within an ecology of media, in which social media and 24-hour news are, I believe, better equipped to convey facts, the kinds of detail-oriented facts that Mark just read out. I think are better served by television news, by radio, by newspapers, and by social media of all kinds,
different kinds of websites, different kinds of blogs. I think the speed of social media and the resources of television and newspaper allows them to convey the kinds of facts that you are asking for. And I think the question of responsibility is not only a question of responsibility to facts. I think what cinema does, or what artists moving image in this case does is construct different kinds of responsibility, which are not only a question of facts. I understand why you put it like that. I mean it's important to say that the question of responsibility in cinema is more a question of montage, it's more a question of creating
different and non-linear relations to an event. The fundamental question is the relation of cinema to an event. In the case of Fukushima, for example, there's a hypothesis which informs the whole film, which relates to Danby's point about Robinson in space, Robinson in Fukushima, and the hypothesis is that there's a difference between an accident and a catastrophe. That an accident is limited in time and space, and that an accident evokes a feeling of fear. And against this, we can counterpose a notion of catastrophe, whose dimensions are unlimited in time and
space, which opens up a dimension of dread. And this has formal implications, and the question is formal. It's what is the formal relation to catastrophe, understood as an unlimited event which opens up a crack in time and space. This was the thesis that we tried to pursue and this is why the film moves in between different archival moments because it tries to say that to understand Fukushima we cannot only stay within the fact of Fukushima, We have to travel back to the test detonations in Bikini Atoll. We have to move to moments in Budapest in 1970.
We have to keep moving around in cinematic time and space to construct something like a cinematic geography of the catastrophe. And this essayistic dimension is why Danvere evokes Patrick Keeler, because this dimension is trying to understand this question of the relation between capitalism and disaster through a formal non-linear relation to an event. And this is just as important as the question of the facts and the question of evidence. It's just as important as the questions of witnessing, questions of testimony.
This question of montage is crucial. And I think this is what film can do outside of, outside the question of resources, outside the question of speed, outside the question of an immediate response. It's to create non-linearities. Would you want to come back on this? Do you have the mic? Yeah, sorry, there's somebody here for the moment, but if you... Okay. Who's waiting. but if you wanted to, it's up to you. Is your point really directed back to the response? I think we've lost, yeah. Yeah, okay. Could we do that and then move on? Thank you. Thanks, I can see you. Yeah. I just can say that when I mean facts,
I'm not necessarily talking about something like the news. maybe that's factual but that's ephemeral because it happens and then it's replaced by something else what you can do with your films is produce something that's actually lasting that is a lasting testament memorial, whatever you want to do, montage I think that's the important aspect and things like the Greenland Common you have there a record but it's more than just a record of somebody who turned up with a camera recording the fact that the facts is actually putting it into a narrative and I think my plea was when you're doing putting these into a narrative your
component elements obviously research is the important thing to make sure the facts that actually make that montage are correct and maybe I'm gonna make a plea for balance because I'm a scientist and I like to see balance. And that's why I go into stakeholder type situations and places where I'm unfamiliar with the sort of environment. So I think because you can produce something that lasts for longer, and I'm very interested in this long period of time and how do we communicate to the future generations? That's what you can do. And the news will have disappeared.
But you're producing something that can communicate to other generations. Thank you. My name is Tomo Hiroshima. I'm a Sussex University student in the UK, but I'm coming from the government of Japan. So before coming to UK, working to support those people who are evacuated from Fukushima area. So in any manner, I'm very happy to see those people across the world focusing on Fukushima accidents. So I'm very happy to see the first movie today. Having said that, I'm wondering a little bit, for example, in your movie, How can I say? Farmer in Iidate village on purpose remained contaminated area for other people's evacuated.
Through this movie, some people think that, oh, Fukushima area is all contaminated and dangerous. But actually, yeah, as far as I'm concerned and supported those people, some area in Fukushima is still safe and not contaminated. They are, in contrast, suffering from rumors about radiation, and their agriculture or tourism activities can't go forward anymore. So yeah, just through those movies, it might be, I don't think it's a bias, but message might be sometimes subjective through movies. And only image that radiation is dangerous and especially might be totally destructive. those images might be rooted in those views.
Or for example, some demonstrating people are against TEPCO's staff, and TEPCO's staff couldn't answer well. But actually, as far as I'm concerned, some staff TEPCO still sincerely try to deal with those people and try to compensate as much as possible. So through my experience in working in the government, Sometimes, yeah, information by the government might be dry and not unemotional, but rather precise or objective. And I'm not sure the word objective or subjective is appropriate or not. But on the other hand, movies might be more emotional, but sometimes subjective and not neutral in sending what actually happens in those contaminated areas of Fukushima.
So my original question was two points. What is the role of movies, theaters, or something only movie can convey and not other media cannot convey? For example, just this description to news or by government. This is one point. But if it's overlapping your previous comment, it's pretty annoying. The second point is, if you can avoid that kind of subjectivity in movies, when you say something about those nuclear issues, what kind of method is possible to avoid that kind of subjectivity?
If you have an opinion. I can say something if you want. I mean, obviously art has no necessary commitment to facts. Otherwise, scientists should be outraged that Spider-Man is bitten by a radioactive spider and be saying, we shouldn't have these comic books because, you know, it misrepresents the danger of radioactive spiders in power plants. But, I mean, I don't want to come across as, like, anti-science or anti-scientist. It's just necessary to understand it within a structure of what knowledge is and how knowledge presents itself.
And art presents itself, not necessarily with a commitment to the truth or as a fact, but the truth, the happening of the truth, I would say, which I think is what you came to with the event. And picking up on what you said there, and another way in which I would say, it's not a simple dichotomy between art and science, it's the way in which art, and in particular film, is itself a product of technology. And I think... And something I'm curious about personally is the scene in The Radiant where the person takes apart the camera. Because I think that's...
I just am curious as to what's going on there. What is the blue prism that comes out at the end? Is that the chip, the receptor? Is it? I mean, I'm just... And the blue is, of course, an evocative colour, and that's the blue of the cooling pools in the power plant. And so art and technology come together there. We have one more response here, and then we have a final question, I would say. I think a way of responding both to your question and to Liam's point is to say that in the Radiant we're not, we don't think the distinction between subjective and objective responses to events is not so useful to us.
it's difficult to keep them apart and it's difficult to have any definition of either. On the contrary, in the Radiant, what's really at stake for us is to reflect on the role that images play in constructing the sense that people have in common of an event which in some way tries to shatter sense. So the film has to find a way to construct a form of sense through fragments. And in the sequence that Liam mentioned,
this is something like a dramatisation of the limits of documentary and the limits of the lens and the limits of camera. The fact that the camera cannot read radiation, it cannot read hot spots, is dramatized in the most direct way. In the scene you see, a camera that takes normal pictures is being dismantled because we want to turn the camera into an infrared camera. The only difference between a normal 5D camera, normal Canon 5D, and an infrared camera is a particular chip. This is the only difference. In the film, there is continuous use of infrared.
These black and white scenes, like the opening scene of Tokyo from Mori Town on the 52nd floor. And the reason we use infrared is because light, light emerges in a powerful way. and the film has an aspiration to make light into an agent, light into an agency, into a character, into an agency which is not a subjectivity. And this is because light is clearly linked to power, to nuclear power. All the light in Tokyo comes from the nuclear power stations in Fukushima, which are carried along the power lines. So light and power are twinned. so this is why the film continually moves between infrared and normal camera
and in this scene there is an attempt to turn one camera into another kind of camera this glass you see is not the chip, it's the moment just before the chip it's not a chip, it's a kind of filter that comes just after this glass but this filter is absolutely innocuous and bland but this is the glass that protects that filter So that's part of what's going on there. It's a kind of dramatization of the limits of the lens. And for us, the essay film as a form is what continually reflects on the incapacity of an image, especially in a political situation, in a situation of high scientific uncertainty,
which is simultaneously a position of political entanglement and of legitimation crisis, it's crucial to reflect on the role that image is playing. And this becomes a way of doing that. And this relates then just briefly to Dan Beer's point. While we were in London researching this film, And we were really struck by the difference between the way Chernobyl was understood, which we remembered from our childhood in 86, and the way Fukushima was understood. If you grew up in Britain during the 80s, Chernobyl was immediately understood as a death sentence for the Soviet state socialism. It was understood as a disaster which exposed its citizens to danger.
Just as in the Elena Popova's film, this nuclear disaster exposes its citizens to danger. And these citizens are already endangered by their secrecy. And then they're exposed by their secrecy, and then they're exposed again by this nuclear disaster. So Soviet state socialism was always understood as a bankrupt system. and we were struck in Britain by the way in which not one media source ever analyzed Fukushima as a death sentence for advanced capitalism that Fukushima coming not long after the the Deepwater Horizon oil spillage over the Gulf of
Mexico through you know very deep historical deep historical mythologies and and economy and safety and questions of time and the relationship between time and economy so for instance in Glovois the reactor is a 24-hour operation surrounded by a public relations nature reserve which has a diurnal time and the guy from the reactor doesn't die because of radiation he dies because he arrives in another time zone which is outside of that economy. He goes from the economy of electricity production to this kind of slightly amateur economy of
these guys going hunting. And so it's this conflict between two incompatible time zones which have very serious economies. I mean, it's a comedy, but it's a serious issue. And this is the thing that I think is important to art, that it is in its relation to serious issues, is that it brings in, I'd say, a panoply of things, which the radiant torso does. So this is the truth. Thanks Mark. We have just one more question or comment here
from the back. Do we have permission to take a little more time over? I think we have to have you two. So two more question comments. Well there's a way of complicating the two cultures vision that's been on display scientific and aesthetic an anecdote I asked you to respond to and that's you know some would say there wasn't Oppenheimer and company invented the atomic bomb there's HG Wells atomic bomb invented in science fiction decades before the Manhattan Project realized that and so much so that late in the second world war the editor of one of the major science fiction magazines in the United States it's a visit from the government and they're telling them they're gonna try and do treason because he's published a story that accurately describes how to build an atomic bomb.
And of course, the editor's response is to go to the back catalog of the journal and show the government that, in fact, for 20 years, a scientific science fiction, whichever journal it was, knew how to build an atomic bomb. And in fact, if you stop publishing these stories at this point, any intelligence service worth at salt could figure out, in fact, you have invented the atomic bomb. Which is just to say that the vision here of art responding to a scientific reality. It's a scientific reality that art itself brought into being, in a way. Thank you. Can we take Susan's question as well? Let me together. Sure, it's more of an observation that she follows really well on that comment by Dan. It's simply, I was thinking about films
that artists have made around the difference between say, representations of atomic energy and nuclear power plants versus films about nuclear warheads and say, atomic bombs, et cetera. And I was really struck by the difference in representation from what some people might characterize as the kind of sadistic metaphysics of atomic energy or the atomic bomb that produces a kind of lipid, the film theorists actually calls it a radical avisuality, kind of a scene beyond sight, if you will. And so anyway, I thought, for me, it's very interesting to look at these projects that are located not in a kind of transcendent sublime, but in a much more kind of imminent
reality of the ground and the ways in which, yeah, so we don't have a kind of atmospheric representation, so to speak, or that's not the dominant, it's not the kind of dominant syntax that's been kind of deployed, but much more an understanding of the nuclear as imminent to the realities on the ground and including the kind of environmental realities. So it's just a kind of observation in what I perceive as a kind of shift in sort of representation or kind of syntax between the transcendent and the imminent, between the atomic bomb versus atomic energy. Yeah, your point about science fiction's imagination of disaster is absolutely correct.
If you look at a writer such as the Swedish writer Sven Lindquist, he looks at science fiction's imperial imagination of bombing and the racist imagination of bombs from the air, of warfare. Between the end of the 19th century and, no, from the middle of the 19th century onwards, there's a continuous series of fantasies of bombing. These bombs are always directed at Asia and Africa. They're always launched by European empires. And in this sense, H.G. Wells' fantasies are a continuity with the kind of imperial fantasies of terror
from the air, in Sloterdijk's sense. And so it wouldn't be surprising if science was then to involve itself in that kind of imperial fantasy. So I guess the difference between imagination and invention is where science fiction turns. It's kind of perspective imagination. and then the kind of secret, the kind of mobilisation of the secrecy of invention that then happens when the Manhattan Project actually finally gets going is really quite powerful. There's a certain sense in which I guess science fiction has primed and has already set the ground in a kind of a massive scale.
And I guess one final point to relate to Susan's point is that I think there's some way in which a lot of the films we've looked at are kind of landscape films, they're kind of landscape studies, because the question of the nuclear can never be contained in the question of a specific reactor or a specific power plant or a specific station. It has to include the harbour, it has to include the ocean, it has to include the elemental, It has to include the fact that radiation hides inside water, that it conceals itself inside the air, that the water drives it into the soil, that it enters into a kind of a meteorology of elements, that radiation makes the weather into its accomplice.
So that the question of radiation cannot be separated from what Minato calls the double invisible landscape. And then the question then becomes how film relates itself to how film constructs methods to make this Dublin visible landscape visible and audible. Do you want to finish off with anything on that? No. No. Okay, well, I mean, slightly open point to leave it on, but I think... I love that the openness was where we started. Yeah, I'm thinking of those images from the camera, the black and white shots of the landscape in the Kishina. Okay, well I think that was really interesting. Thank you so much to everybody and to a few speakers.