Dave Young - Notes on Tutorial I
Net Art
Links:
It's been a while since I've played with this project (and it seems it's not really running very well any more), but I think it's a good example of a work that visualises the distribution of power in networks. Perhaps Milgram's 'Small World Theory' is true when applied to the Power Structures database? The work illustrates how power/control tends to cluster in geographical space, as well as in the economic, corporate and social spheres, and is more successful for allowing a 'user' to investigate the connections on their own. As the user explores the connections between Coca Cola, Apple and Enron, for example, a surprising network of close relationships tend to appear, leaving the user to draw their own conclusions about the concentration of economic power in the United States and elsewhere.
S/W Art
Installation
Video
The Radiant explores the aftermath of March 11 2011, when the Great Tohoku Earthquake struck the North East Coast of Japan at 2.46pm, triggering a tsunami that killed tens of thousands and causing the partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. In the fissures opened by these catastrophes, The Radiant travels through time and space, invoking the historical promise of nuclear energy and summoning the future threat of radiation that converge upon the benighted present. Under these conditions, the illuminated cities and evacuated villages of Japan can be understood as a laboratory for the global nuclear regime that exposes its citizens to the necropolitics of radiation.
I managed to see The Radiant during the Rotterdam Film Festival - while it may not appear to be directly linked with my current research, it did explore how the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric handled the "responsibility" of the failure of multiple safety systems in the Nuclear Power Plant, and the illegal clean-up process and disinformation campaign following the meltdown (eventually categorised on par with Chernobyl as a level 7 disaster) on the 11th March. According to the film, the highly radioactive soil was transported from the Fukushima region and spread around the entire country in order to lower the concentration of the radioactivity, but also as a means to distort control group statistics and comparisons with other regions in the future. In this way, the physical redistribution of the soil disguises its potency - which we can see as being a metaphor for disguising power through decentralisation.