Start a Reaction Culminating Event

Saturday, Aug 7, 2021 4:30 – 7:30 pm

Start a Reaction Culminating Event

Location: Nuclear Energy Sculpture Plaza

5625 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637

Date: August 7, 4:30-7:30pm

Open to the Public

 

The public is invited to attend this event staged on the University of Chicago campus at the original site of Chicago Pile-1, the birthplace of humanity’s first sustained nuclear reaction.

This event will feature two new works: They did not hesitate by Eiko Otake and How do we trouble time? by Judd Morrissey in collaboration with Abraham Avnisan and Taylor Shuck.

Performances of these works will occur alternately every 30 minutes: 

• How do we trouble time? by Judd Morrissey at 5:30, 6:30, and 7:30 pm.

• They did not hesitate by Eiko Otake at 5:00, 6:00, 7:00 pm.

 

Start a Reaction is a project of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice bringing together a team of artists and curators to illuminate the pernicious threat of nuclear arms. This project’s mission is to build a coalition in support of nuclear non- proliferation and disarmament through the use of art and technology.

Our collective action consists of an in-person event on the University of Chicago campus on August 7 (between the anniversaries of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) from 4:30 to 7:30 pm, preceded by social media and performance workshops.

The August 7 event at the site of humankind’s first sustained nuclear reaction (Chicago Pile-1) will feature a new performance by acclaimed Japanese artist, Eiko Otake. In addition, artist Judd Morrissey, in collaboration with Abraham Avnisan and Taylor Shuck, have developed interactive, tech-based engagements that are both site-specific and available on the web utilizing the medium of augmented reality (AR).

A website (startareaction.org) will supplement this event by modeling an artistic response to the issue of nuclear nonproliferation and presenting a “toolkit” for future responses to build upon. It will also act as an archive of our August 7 event and offer resources for activists who are interested in staging similar interventions in the disarmament space.

Start a Reaction is a project of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice (ICRP), in collaboration with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and in partnership with Pedro Reyes’s Amnesia Atomica. It is supported by a grant from the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation. 

See startareaction.org or media kit for more information.

 

They did not hesitate by Eiko Otake

They did not hesitate is a new site-specific performance work created and performed by MacArthur Fellow Eiko Otake. Born and raised in post-war Japan but a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko is a movement-based interdisciplinary artist. Combining movements and monologues, this ritual of mourning invites viewers to imagine what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki this week 76 years ago.  Her frail, unadorned body will also intersect with the site  of the first sustained nuclear chain reaction. Eiko asks: How can we stop celebrating the history of massive killings and technology that made it possible?   How can we learn to hesitate against momentum? How can we survive? 

 

How do we trouble time? by Judd Morrissey

In collaboration with Abraham Avnisan and Taylor Shuck

How do we trouble time? is an augmented reality installation experienced at the site of Chicago Pile-1, where a nuclear chain reaction under Enrico Fermi led to the atomic bomb and the violent proliferation of a nuclear age. In honor of the hibakusha and inspired by what quantum mechanics tells us about the true nature of time, this AR environment is conceived as a sanctuary of fluid temporalities, a landscape of voids churning with the voices of those who have been or may in the future be catastrophically impacted—without our action—by the violence of American militarism, colonialism, and nuclear devastation that has seeped into society since the moment of Fermi’s 1942 experiment. The viewer will be able to navigate the site through provided Ipads, to encounter text, audio, and visual events guided by informative provocations from the past and potential future. 

 

Atomic Chrysalis (Instagram filter) by Maysam Al-Ani

Location: Smartphone-based app

Date: Ongoing

This project by digital media artist Maysam Al-Ani, specially commissioned for Start a Reaction, utilizes an interactive Instagram AR filter to explore topics of metamorphosis and emergence, inspired by the symbols surrounding the narrative of nonproliferation. By marshalling the ubiquitous and often superficial medium of the “selfie” to the nuclear cause, Al-Ani presents a facetious and knowing commentary on the current state of nuclear discourse in popular culture. The filter places its user into an animation depicting a cycle of nuclear death and florid rebirth, presenting a nuclear crisis that is at once poignant and accessible, individualized and — in the end — inescapably social.

Atomic Chrysalis will debut on August 2 and run for the duration of the Start a Reaction project. For more info and to download filter, go to https://www.instagram.com/ar/347282470319790/

 

Past Shadow, Future Light by Hugo Juarez

The complex relationship of art to memorialization is as alive—and fraught—today as at any time in history. In this photographic study, Hugo Juarez reconsiders both the form and meaning of Henry Moore’s work commemorating the 25th anniversary of the first self-sustaining controlled nuclear reaction and installed in 1967 at the Chicago site of Enrico Fermi’s experiment. Yet even Moore felt the complicity of his actions. Naming his work Atom Piece (1964-66), this title was not lost on the commissioners who renamed it more benignly Nuclear Energy.

While Moore’s art was part of the nuclear conversation, the beginning of the atomic age, Juarez’s honors his legacy at a time of renewed call for nuclear non-proliferation. Contemplating what once was and transforming it to something new, he further abstracts the work into a suite of images at once elegant and melancholy. Curves of the sculpture are accentuated; the play of shadows in the negative spaces highlight its internal forms. Here the age-long tradition of marshalling the beauty of art in the spirit of activism, Juarez honors the lives affected by nuclear arms and seeks to reintroduce the nuclear conversation into public consciousness.