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"designs for fragile personalities in anxious times"

The nuclear is like revolution. -jean baudrillard

"The nuclear is like revolution. nothing is gained from hoping for the one or fearing the other, since both have already happened. Everything is already liberated, changed, subverted. What more do you want? There's no use hoping: the things are there, born or stillborn, already in the past- it's exasperating, but what can you do about it? No future. No cause for panic either: everything's already nuclearized, enucleated, vaporized. The explosion has already happened, the bomb is only a metaphor. What more do you want: everything is already wiped off the map. It's no good dreaming: the confrontation has already happened, quietly, everywhere. Yet it isn't enough for things to have happened: we also want to see them as a spectacle. The people wanted the spectacle of the revolution. Things themselves also want to experience the rupture of a spectacular metaphor. This is the revenge of the objectivity in which we have confined them.

What will become of the nuclear? Will we insist on having the grand spectacle of the atomic confrontation for the beauty of it? If that happens, it will not be for reasons currently advanced - the fatal dynamic of the use-value of weapons or the species becoming resigned to its own destruction - but from the irresistibility of the spectacle of destruction and the necessity, for us, of deriving some enjoyment from it."

From Cool Memories by Jean Baudrillard translated by Chris Turner verso publishing 1987 NY p 55-56

Small Nuclear Plant Exlosion in France

CBS reports on the small explosion at the Marcoule Nuclear Plant recently in France, a country heavily dependent on nuclear power. No leaks have been found almost a week later, which is great!

Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 at ICP

Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 from ICP on Vimeo.

International Center for Photography's exhibition this past summer of declassified photos from US government research team after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima. The photos of this show where about 4x6" in a small installation room that in concentric circles were organized based on the distance of the photo's location from the where the bomb hit.

Here on the Leonard Lopate Show, the curators, Erin Barnett and Adam Harrison Levy talk about the work-