Jack's section ("D")
2:10 - 3:25PM Rm 304 - 63 5th Ave (UC)
Final Presentations of Projects 12/4 in class
2:10 - 3:25PM Rm 304 - 63 5th Ave (UC)
THis is the best example of a post-human nuclear experience that I have found yet (-Christopher):
(Article above)
The sublime refers to an aesthetic experience that overwhelms, exceeds, spills over the capacities of our senses. Historically, the sense of the sublime has hewed closely to divine experience. But even within a secular age, that which seems to escape comprehension and intuition routine falls back on religious imagery. Oppenheimer described the Trinity site explosion through the Bhagavad Gita, victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki perceived the robbing of Life itself. More recently, in response to the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear meltdown, Shintaro Ishihara saw "God's punishment."
In what ways does the nuclear imaginary stretch the limits of human sensory experiences and cognitive comprehension, how does it challenge what and how we know? How does Chernobyl play with the fundamental uncertainties regarding knowledge of nuclear-related events?
Cultural anthropology has operated under the assumption that language and symbols are fluid-they vary across space and time, are tethered to particular ecologies, cultural systems, lifeways, and histories. Signs-linguistic, auditory, visual-don't mean the same things to the same people, and they change over time.
Designers of warning symbols for nuclear waste are thus asked to perform an impossible task-to signal to those living in the far future, tens and even hundreds of thousands of years later, that what remains is dangerous. What considerations do these designers have to take into account? Do you think they succeed?
Your teaching team leader may adjust this. The proposal will be due on October 16th
Article on US's adoption of Weapons-Grade Uranium for civilian power plants: Link
An article on Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, plus a talk by him from the Long Now Foundation.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2130/pg2130-images.html