[-empyre-] Fwd: Chernobyl Project

[Timothy Murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

sorry for cross-postings; it doesn't appear to us that alice's 
posting ever went out over the list.

Renate and Tim


From: Alice Miceli <alicemiceli@terra.com.br>
Subject: Chernobyl Project
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 17:19:36 +0200
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
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Hello,

Thanks to Tim and Renate for the invitation and for the introduction. 
I am very glad to take part in this very active discussion. Sorry for 
taking a little while to post this statement. Please excuse my "weird 
English".

I agree with Maurice, for sure, that "criticality" belongs to very 
nature of any artistic engagement, in general. I was then wondering 
how "critical spatial practice" would particularly relate to my 
ongoing work, the "Chernobyl Project", and it seems to me that it is 
in the very base of the work, as it attempts to produce critical 
specific images of a very critical space, the Chernobyl Exclusion 
Zone, in Belarus. The Chernobyl zone is, indeed, critical in many 
different layers - from an ecological and technological to a 
humanitarian point of view. This critical space is not one that 
easily lets its images be created, as the question of "visibility" is 
also central here. But, at first, I should state a brief description:

The Chernobyl Project is based on issues related to radiation in the 
Chernobyl exclusion zone, especially on the Byelorussian side. Its 
aim is to produce radiographic images of the zone, exposed through 
the very radiation that has intoxicated this "space". In order to 
make this happen, we are testing two different techniques: a 
specially designed led pinhole camera that is totally closed to light 
and "sees" invisible gamma radiation. We are also working on another 
technique for imprinting invisible gamma radiation emitted by 
contaminated matter: the direct contact between an appropriate 
radiographic film and the right radioactivity energy level. In both 
techniques, the invisible, high-level gamma radiation present in the 
exclusion zone is the only source of film exposure. It will produce 
images of the "invisible". Images of a certain kind of energy present 
in this space and yet totally invisible except for the destruction 
traces it leaves behind.

How to look at a very intriguing place, the exclusion zone, in a 
specific way, specific to that place? A deserted, abandoned zone. 
Empty, yet filled with something invisible. I thought about what had 
happened there. This evil energy, where was it, where were its 
traces? Is it possible to sense it, to touch the immaterial, the 
invisible? It crossed my mind that this vast "waste ground" had 
become a place where this invisible matter could not be contained any 
longer. The "Chernobyl Project" attempts to make this visible. 
Visibility / invisibility is our core concept. Physical visibility - 
considering that we are developing techniques to  "see" the 
invisible, to see an invisible matter; but also social-political 
visibility, considering that even though the reactor is across the 
border, in Ukraine, contamination is at higher levels in Belarus, a 
country that is even less socially visible than its neighbor. 
Globally, the public opinion and the European countries fail to 
recognize, let alone address, this problem. Something that was not 
only a traumatic event in the past - it is a current, urgent 
situation, and it will continue to be for hundred of years.

Finally, getting back to the focus of our discussion here, the 
question that the Chernobyl Project asks is how to critically look at 
a critical space. That's the first layer. Further on, I would also 
like to comment a second layer: in producing an account of this 
process, in the form of an online journal posted at a blog 
(http://www.jblog.com.br/chernobyl2.php) I was also confronted with 
the question of transfiguring this quest to the form a virtual space. 
It begins like this:

"This blog starts with the beginning of a journey. It will present 
simultaneously a journal of my travels and the creative process of 
the work. My destination is the exclusion zone of Chernobyl. I will 
be leaving in a week to Belarus, for the first contact with the 
exclusion zone, which is right on the border between Belarus and 
Ukraine.
To step into somewhere called "exclusion zone" presents, in itself, a 
problem. I hope you will be interested in joining me on the way as it 
unravels. The posts will, by and by, shape the virtual space here 
initiated.
Bill Viola, the pope of video art, has published his working journal 
entitled Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House. I thought: there are 
many reasons for knocking on the doors of a ghost city, on the doors 
of an excluded, deserted zone. What is this place? What happens 
there? How could I generate specific images of a place devastated by 
an extensive but invisible energy, only noticeable through its tracks 
of destruction?
With luck, after bumping many times on corners, edges, traces of 
unidentified things, it might be viable to find and turn on a switch 
somewhere that in shedding light in the room might connect the dots. 
To work!"

Thinking that this whole endeavor is a leap into the unknown, into a 
negative space, into something that comes to being, to a form, as we 
look, the idea was to shape the virtual space of the blog as the 
works develops. To begin with, by an active appropriation of the 
general default form of blogs, developing post by post, but also in 
making that these posts, being written white on a totally black 
background, are the only orientation marks a visitor come across with 
to guide himself, little by little, in this virtual space, as a 
"cybernetic stalker".

Hopefully, the discussion of Chernobyl Project in relation to 
"critical space practices" will interest you. I would be very glad to 
take it further.
Thank you.

Alice

--- end forwarded text


--
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video Studies
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
285 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853