February-April 2002 The Bomb Project | Project Proposal + project description/core concept The Bomb Project is conceived as a comprehensive on-line artists' resource for nuclear documentation. It is intended for use by artists working in all media, including net.art and DV, as well as more traditional, non-electronic forms. It gathers together links to nuclear image archives (still and moving), historical documents, current news, information (and disinformation). It makes accessible the declassified files and graphic documentation produced by the nuclear industry itself, providing a platform for comparative study, analysis and creativity. The Bomb Project will help us assess our cultural attraction/repulsion vis-a-vis images of mass destruction and apocalypse. It will draw from and link to important critical works that broach this topic, such as cultural theorist Ariella Azoulay's treatment of public and aesthetic displays of death in her r ecent book Death's Showcase (2001) and Kyo Maclear's Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki & the Art of Witness(1999). The Bomb Project will intermittently put out a call for new projects. The goal is to involve creative approaches that deal with and utilize the documentation at hand and to invigorate categories of expression such as: agitprop, database and archival strategies, critical analysis, activist as well as other modes of conceptual and aesthetic experimentation. A bulletin board will be set up for discussion, feedback and contributions. + background please see project background + some historical background By the end of the Cold War, general public concern over the threat of nuclear incidents both accidental and intended, was on the wane. Cultural awareness continued to atrophy until 1998, when both India and Pakistan began performing competitive and globally high-profile underground nuclear tests in a furious nationalistic display of nuclear capability. The rest of the nuclear-capable world took notice.This wake-up call was followed by several others, not the least of which was the1999 resignation of Richard Butler, the UN Commissions Chief in charge of weapons inspection in Iraq. In November 2000, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, a weekend conference was convened entitled "The Second Nuclear Age and the Academy," organized by Dr. Robert J. Lifton, author, psychiatrist and director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Jonathan Schell, author of several books on nuclear weapons. The conference marked a shift in academic attitude, a breaking away from what Lifton describes as our state of "psychic-numbing," or collective denial regarding the global nuclear situation. The Bomb Project, in keeping with this intellectual as well as emotional "call to arms," seeks to provide a proactive node from which different categories of information regarding the world's nuclear state of affairs can be accessed and compared, and used as a platform for experimentation, innovation and productivity in the arts community [online and off] . + production timeline This project will be cumulative and ongoing. + other relevant projects The Bomb Project [background] Buster-Jangle [exhibition documentation, background to The Bomb Project] Night Vision [exhibition documentation 2002/2003] Rocket Science [exhibition documentation 2001] + First Pulse Projects, Inc. +++ |
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| >>> info @ thebombproject.org |
| >>> info @ thebombproject.org |