2011-07-11 Unknown Fields: From the Atomic to the Cosmic

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http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1597 Unknown Fields: From the Atomic to the Cosmic Summer 2011 Trajectory Public Forum 1 Introductions Download full programme Pdf here This year, on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight and the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl Disaster, we pack our Geiger counters and spacesuits and chart a course from the atomic to the cosmic to investigate the unknown fields between nature and artifice. Joining us for the Atomic to the Cosmic forum will be an ensemble of artists, authors, scientists and designers. Through the lens of these two events we will re-examine our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world and spin tales of the ecologically fragile and the technologically obsolete.To be the first to enter the cosmos, to engage, single-handed, in an unprecedented duel with nature-could one dream of anything more!Yuri Gagarin  1100 UNKNOWN FIELDS <http://www.unknownfieldsdivision.com/>  INTRO by LIAM YOUNG <http://www.tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com/>  andKATE DAVIES <http://www.liquidfactory.co.uk/> 1120 THE ATOMICMICHAEL MADSEN <http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/>  [film maker]Film maker Michael Madsen will be traveling with the Unknown Fields Division on our Chenobyl to Baikonur project. Michael directed  the recent documentary Into Eternity, which tells the story of the Onkolo Nuclear Waste Repository in Finland, a facility that must remain intact for 100,000 years even though no structure in human history has even stood for such a long period of time. The film addresses an audience in the remote future and questions Onkolo’s eternal existence and its legacy as a reminder of this toxic energy source. MARIO PETRUCCI <http://www.mariopetrucci.com/heavywater.htm>  [poet]Originally a Natural Sciences graduate with a PhD in optoelectronics, Mario Petrucci works as a freelance creative writing tutor, broadcaster and educator. Mario has published a book-length poem on the Chernobyl didaster titled Heavy Water. Petrucci takes up the challenge confronting society in every age: to attempt the difficult task of exploring its most terrible events. His poem unites the concerns of artist, humanitarian and historian at a common source: the desire not to forget. Heavy Water exists to remind us that those who have been exposed to the invisible should never become so. CORNELIA HESSE HONEGGER <http://www.wissenskunst.ch/en/tschernobyl.htm>  [scientific illustrator]Cornelia Hesse Honegger is a scientific illustrator and science artist. For 25 years she worked as a scientific illustrator for the scientific department of the Natural History Museum at the University of Zurich. Her watercolours are exhibited internationally at museums and galleries. Her work is at the interface of art and science; it plays witness to a beautiful but endangered nature. Since the catastrophe of Chernobyl in 1986, she has collected, studied and painted morphologically disturbed insects, which she finds in the fallout areas of Chernobyl as well as near nuclear installations. PETER WYNN KIRBY <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/japans-long-nuclear-disaster-film/>  [environmental anthropologist ]Peter Wynn Kirby is an ‘environmental anthropologist’ and researcher with the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford. In his latest book, Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan, he considers experiences of nuclear risk and national/cultural constructions of energy, power, pollution, and waste in Japan and in France – the two major nations that depend most on nuclear power, yet where the risks and benefits of nuclear power play out over vastly different sociocultural topographies. WILL WILES <http://willwiles.blogspot.com/> [author/journalist]Will WIles is deputy editor of the architecture and design journal Icon and has recently completed his debut novel Care of Wooden Floors, a black comedy about a man being driven insane by minimalist interior decoration. Through the Unknown Fields project he will be developing a new book titled Toxic Tourism which will be published by Harper Press in mid 2012 STEPHAN TRÜBY <http://www.exit-limited.com/>  [architect/curator]Dr Stephan Trüby (b. 1970) is an architect, theoretician and curator. He was Professor of Architecture at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and has published such books as 5 Codes: Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror,  Exit-Architecture: Design between War and Peace and Hertzianism: Electromagnetism in Architecture, Design and Art. PHILIPS DESIGN PROBES <http://www.design.philips.com/probes/index.page>  [technology designers]Philips Design Probes is a dedicated ‘far-future’ research initiative to track trends and developments across the realms of politics, economics, culture, environmen