ANDY WEIR

The Plureal Deal, 2016

single-channel video with sound, 9'22"

 

The video is based on a speculative proposal to narrate the material history and lifecycle of Uranium, from formation in the Earth's crust to 4.46 billion years in the future, through associative processes and images. 

 

PART ONE: Drawing on a history of nuclear power in developing cloud computing infrastructures, alongside paranoid fictions of Uranium glo-sticks in 1990s rave culture, the first part of the video assembles found internet footage as a search for knowledge of such extended temporalities. This structures an absurd search for ‘the Real’, figured through the claims of a 2013 Toyota car ad.

 

PART TWO: Following the artist’s research visit to the HADES laboratory in Mol, Belgium, the second part of the video traces isotopes in waste through its long-term storage and anticipated long-term futures – splitting to four futures modelled and imagined in different ways - computer modelling of clay absorption rates; scenario planning; real-time video observation and a myth of demonological contagion (later developed into the Pazugoo work). These four futures unfold simultaneously as computer windows, against a default Mac desktop background as icon of the cosmic.

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Screenings of the work in specific contexts include:

 

Forming part of an installation of Andy Weir's work at Perpetual Uncertainty: Contemporary Art and the Nuclear Anthropocene, Umea Bildmuseet, Sweden, Nov 2016 - April 2017.

 

Part of the Arts Catalyst 'Nuclear Art and Archives: Artists' Film' event at Dundee Contemporary Arts, April 2017.

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At the event 'Digital Ecologies and the Anthropocene' at Bath Spa University, curated by Charlie Tweed, April 2017.

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Part One was shown at 'Anywhere and Elsewhere: Art at the outermost limits of location-specificity' 1st Biennial Conference of Project Anywhere, New School, New York, November 2014, published with text in Anywhere v.1

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