Deep Field [Unclear Zine]
- Submitting institution
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Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 222570
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of production
- October
- Year of production
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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B - Art & Performance
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This research contributes to urgent interdisciplinary discussion about the growing physical and cultural presence of radioactivity. What does it mean to bury and remember toxic nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years? Artists offer different perspectives to scientists in tackling this social and environmental emergency. Deep Field [Unclear Zine] documents scientists and citizens in a Belgian nuclear zone, engaging archival media to narrate the multiple troubling affects in the community. Their complex remit is to manage the nation’s legacy of nuclear waste, and resolve how decisions and places are communicated to protect the biohazard from contact by future generations. Using its original storytelling method of microtopia, this research documents interweaving times and spaces that construct the heterotopia of the nuclear zone. A past of colonial uranium exploitation overlaps with an anxious present, and uncertain future. These narratives assemble in a zine, published in the miniaturising medium of microfilm, to be expanded and browsed using simple magnifying apparatus. Fieldwork documented the zone’s experimental technology and micropolitics through photography, conversations and performance. Employing Haraway’s ‘SF’ storytelling, this ‘science-fact’ was also re-narrated as ‘speculative fabulation’, inventing fictional characters and scenarios in poetry and comics-art. Factual and speculative modes were collaged, creating a single microfilm sheet. The zine critically depicts journeys of nuclear materiality entangled in the compressed techno-scientific infrastructure. The research yielded a new method for contemporary media art to discuss how troubled places may be counter-witnessed and memorialised. Analogue microfilm, which can last 500 years, could enact additional archival modality to overcome limitations of short-lived digital records or physical monuments. This insight was shared through a touring exhibition, public roundtables, and noted by archaeologists on the AHRC-funded Heritage Futures programme. Deep Field also crossed into art-science and new-materialist theory networks through STEAM events, conference panels and a book chapter.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -