The Doomsday Clock is currently set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history.
At least three generations of men and women have been born since the scientific discovery of the nuclear atom and the invention of nuclear weapons, in other words — into the Nuclear Age. Today, it is undeniable that nuclear presence lingers on our consciousness, existence, environment and borders; it underlines our geopolitics, energy grids, psyches and futures.
While mass media and history classrooms focus on the narratives of disaster and spectacle, what is often neglected is the omitted and misunderstood history of nuclear development. To responsbily and intelligently store the physical wastes of radioactive substances poses to the human race a pressing and difficult dillema: how do we keep this gravely dangerous material safe for all lives on earth for the next 10,000 years? This research project initiates the communication and public education task by inventing ways to speak about nuclear legacy, in face of its presence with us for the next decamillenium.
The Nuclear Alphabet is a research and documentary project tracing the insensate, invisible and buried contaminations of nuclear things through the literal tools of language. The A to Z is an attempt to contain the invisible presence of nuclear culture with the container of the alphabet. Through examining everyday language which have been mutated by the development of nuclear things, the project approaches the haunting precariousness of nuclear phenomena. New expressions were forged; old meanings, effaced. As art critic Sven Lütticken writes, nuclear aesthetics is a form of “negative theology of the insensate.” This alphabet of contaminated words is a lexicon of the otherwise obscure and unspeakable in the nuclear age.
Transmutating the children’s alphabet, NATO phonetic alphabet and Deleuze’s alphabet book, the Nuclear Alphabet is designed to narrate nuclear’s heterogenous stories. Since ancient Greek and Indian philosophical traditions, the atom has been the representation of the utmost indivisible unit of matter. In the immaterial world, letters were invented to describe all which are signifiable — letters make visible invisible matters.