I attended the December 2nd Nuclear Energy event at the University of Chicago that we talked about in class. Here is a video I made by combining my own footage from the event with the official video put out by the university:
Password: e=mc2
The anniversary ceremony of Cai Guo-Qiang’s pyrotechnic display satisfied my expectations of a profoundly spectacular and monumental moment. The artist himself described the work beforehand as “being a defining symbol of humanity in the 21st century”. The lecture series that followed, programmed by the University of Chicago, was also very informative and delved deeper into the meaning of the Henry Moore sculpture “Nuclear Energy” and surrounding temporary installation “Nuclear Thresholds” that served as the foreground for the pyrotechnics display. The temporary installation surrounding the Moore sculpture very symbolically and playfully expressed the bifurcation of nuclear fission through it’s clever expansive division of long rubber cords into a messy playful pile of chaos:
Ann Wagner, a prominent art historian, gave an interesting lecture on Henry Moore’s cast bronze sculpture “Nuclear Energy”, which like Cai Guo-Qiang’s performance, celebrated the earlier 50th anniversary of the Chicago Pile 1 experiment in 1942 by being unveiled at 3:36pm on December 2nd, 1967. Most notably, she mentioned that Henry Moore was the victim of a gas attack on the front lines during world war one in 1917. Gas based weapons have since been banned globally as a weapon of warfare because of their horribly demonstrable effects on human health and unethical destruction of innocent civilian populations. I thought this anecdote was interesting in respect to his working on a sculptural piece grappling with the celebratory anniversary of a technology which lead to a similarly unethical weapon of the atomic bomb which dealt destruction and horror beyond the power of a chemical gas attack. How do we define what is unethical in warfare? How do we determine when enough destruction is enough? Is it the number of lives lost, or the bad feeling in our stomachs?
Heres an article of the event posted by the University of Chicago:
And if you’d like the see some more of Cai Guo-Qiang’s work you can find a cool, non-nuclear related, video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHLd-QIb2_U
-Matt