The eternal emissions of a dying star; Glasgow International 2026, multimedia installation
What does it mean to care across millennia?
The decomissioning of nuclear energy sites is a process that dwarfs our time, asking us to conceptialise wolds to come and how we might be recieved in the distant future. Symbols decay into new matter, mirroring the decay chain of the radioactive uranium isotopes used in nuclear reactor fuel cells. Uranium turns to lead, symbols turn to new meaning.
At the Hunterston nuclear power site, administrative, material, and fiscal concerns have drawn out a decomissioning process that seeks to scrub this site of its radioactive past and present. However, with proposals for permanent storage of waste deemed (by who?) to be low level radioactive waste, trace remnants of the degredation of one specific energy regime.
Also at the Hunterston site, an unearthed sherd of grooved ware pottery and remains of a cereal-drying kiln speak for an energy regime of the distant past. Inhabiting that sherd we read into the lives and culture of a society that inhabited the site millennia before now. Drawing on the materialities of nuclear power stations and long-term waste disposal projects, while remixing the symbols put forward in the field of nuclear semiotics making them specific to the Hunterston site, this installation opens up into the unreal and deferred field of long-term nuclear waste disposal. Suffusing this a 5.1 surround sound piece uses textures drawn out from field recordings, geophones and digital archives, to become a degraded tocsin call.
Materials / works: ut steel channels, steel thistles, etched and corroded steel and copper plates, Clyde water, concrete, moving image, graphite pencil illustration,