The sound and the aftermath

Upcoming talk, sonically enhanced by David Fyans.  A one-off screening of Atom Town will follow.
Centrespace, VRC
6 October, 9.30am – 4.30pm
Part of
Shared Imagination: Art and Science Collaborations 

<<<<<<      The sound of the moment of atomic fission is a thin compulsive music; the indefinable orchestration of immense invisible forces, disciplined inside a kind of terrible elegance. The powerhouses of the nuclear age are quiet and clean, stark and sterile. This country has many of them, spread across the land; at Berkeley and Bradwell,… (fade names)     >>>>>>>
 
As the reassuring sounds of easy swinging jazz fades, so do the tones of confidence within the nuclear adventure. Their echoes fascinate. The poignant turn to the tone of certainty, the pleasures of the archive and the challenge of the debased but hopefully redeemable real world are the subjects of “Atom Town: life after technology”.

The future is a product not only of the tangible physicalities, the new infrastructures, the demographics of a rural population doubling and mutating into a scientific powerhouse; it’s inside our minds. When the actual future has rolled on by, and slower rhythms of a country town re-assert themselves, the idea of the future lingers on. The vestiges become rusty but somehow sharper as signs. Atomic fission has ceased. “The Atomics” remain.

The sound of the aftermath of atomic experiment is the clipclops.  Ceaseless beta gamma and neutron detectors constantly proclaim their readiness. It's a peculiarly insistent sound, but a lot of the Dounreay staff don't even hear it anymore; they just notice very very quickly if it stops. Air pressurization systems howl and hiss. It’s not quiet in there.

It is however very quiet in the fading hotels of Thurso. On my first visit, I follow the itinerary of the 1966 film “Atom Town” and choose the Royal Hotel. It’s quiet; the open fire in the black and white footage is boarded up. The room is small and damp. Breakfast next morning is served in a huge empty ballroom, dusty swags pulled back from reinforced glass windows. I see a moth floating in the milkjug at the first table I try to sit at. And the next. All of them, in fact. Late night table settings have distributed moth drownings evenly across the east side of the room.

 Going over the barrier for the first time is a frightening experience.  A long bench runs across a room; all you have to do is get the protective layers on without touching the ground on the Inside. The oversuit you’ve been issued with suddenly seems impossible to figure out. Wobbling, unbalanced, teetering, trying to get the overshoes on without touching the floor. Scanned in, scanned out. Claustrophobic cabinets; adopt the positions when prompted by an automated voice. All around other people are cracking jokes, relaxed, as if it’s normal life. And of course, it is. It’s a taster of what life might have become for many more of us, if the trans-uranic economy had fully taken off. It’s also strangely intimate. Dust, gas, splinters, particles, all to be kept from the body. It induces much more bodily awareness than is strictly comfortable; vulnerability is thy name. It feels like the moment before a long climb. You don’t really want to think about what will happen if the scanners go off on your way back out.

Why do I want to be a foreign body in this vast system? Curiosity. A system of experiment and knowledge that seemed part of a hostile state: my own country. Antinuclear convictions seemed mere common sense. Now the world is more complex. Environmentalists are divided.
What is inside those fences which seemed so intractable?

A sense of another life I might have led: a studious boy, keen on physics, with a promising scientific education ahead. Instead, a chance viewing of “Children of Hiroshima’ followed by 3 sleepless nights and a horror of the nuclear.

In a world devoted to the whims of junior accountants, without any content in politics, can we look back on a time where major innovations took place, where senses of common purpose prevailed, where an imperfect peace carried grains of optimism? Can we look at such a world without nostalgia? Can we glean any lessons on how to construct new senses of purpose?

Come over the barrier. It’ll be OK.