Fallout

• In Event: Transnational STS Media-Making: Producing Films and Videos for Research, Classroom and Beyond

Abstract

This paper reflects on the outcomes of audio documentaries for which descendants of Nuclear Test Veterans were interviewed with an intention of creating a piece of verbatim theatre. The project however mutated into the creation of a series of audio portraits which mixed the recorded testimonies of the descendants with interviews with experts from other disciplines and dramatic fictional scenes, tying them together with narrative poetry. The descendants reflect on the ill health carried with them as a result of chromosomal transmutation caused by experiments on the other side a of the world a generation before them. The first part of the essay describes the creation of the pieces and the decisions behind the form and content.
The attempt to reflect on the mutation from story to portrait draws heavily on the work of anthropologist Joseph Masco. 'Nuclear Children' often carry with them an embodied feeling of contradiction in which imperceptible change signals both development and decay. Part 2 is an analysis of the audio pieces with reference to Masco’s concept of the nuclear uncanny. Masco’s work on the individual, local and national psyche in America following the Manhattan project borrows from Sigmund Freud’s famous notion of The Uncanny, in which contradictions between the strange and the familiar are embraced to create an anxiety which changes an individual’s relationship with their surroundings.

Author

• Gordon Murray, University of Winchester