unsanitized 2009

3D animatioin and found video and custom sound.

approximate total running time : 9:05

This work was created for an exhibition entitled Lineage at the San Francisco Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Historical Archive. The piece is a poetic meditation on the collection of material donated by the friends of Charles Schwob. Schwob was a chemical and nuclear engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed atomic weaponry. After his work on the bomb he went on to work for the Navy studying the effects of radioactive penetration into buildings.

Schwob worked for one of the most secretive and homophobic of government institutions during the McCarthy era. Yet he never married nor did he seem to hide his sexuality. Among records of his work on the Manhattan Project were an extensive series of erotic photographs of young men - a number of them appeared to be soldiers.

Schwobs life and the history of the atomic era inspired me to reflect on the idea of an open secret. Having grown up at the end of this era it struck me how these secrets have embedded themselves in my psyche. In my research on this period for this piece I discovered newly released film of the hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the 1950's. These tests are referenced by their code name in Schwob's archive.

For this video work I collected clips from the recently released "unsanitized" films. I then created 3D computer graphic animations to divide the video into a prologue and three "acts". The prologue is pulled from the title sequences of the unsanitized films. Following the prologue there is a video of the engineer with his slide rule - among Schwob's materials were his slide rules. Following this we see a bunker and slowly approach and enter the space. As we descend a countdown is heard. A door opens and we see multiple mushroom clouds exploding. This first "act" represents the bomb as it is inscribed in the cultural and individual unconscious. For me having grown up with "duck and cover" the bomb is always there lurking and waiting to be dropped. In the video the bomb has been dropped and we now live on the other side of this rupture.

At the star of the second "act" we enter a clapboard house in the desert. The house is a model of an actual house that was built and then destroyed by a bomb test. A number of the atomic tests we conducted on exact replica middle-class suburban homes outfitted with furniture and clothed maniquins ironically representing the "nuclear" family. In this act I overlay many of the stuctures that were destroyed in the tests creating ghosts of dematerialized and pulverated buildings. This act represent the rupture to the domestic sphere, which parallels the dislocation of the nuclear family by the homosexual other within its "home" - what Freud termed the "Unheimlich" (literally "unhomely") or the Uncanny.

In the final "act" we arrive at the rubble of the psyche. We enter to witness the militarilly proscribed and homoerotic bodies of the soldiers working at the test sites. These soldiers expose their bodies to the sun of the South Pacific islands and to the 1000 suns of the atomic tests. Often soldiers witnessed the blasts from close range and returned to the sites within hours of a test. The body becomes the site of an experiment much like animals that were exposed to the radiation of these tests.

Finally we see the bomb shrouded being lifted from a ship onto the island. This image resonated with the unconscious "lump" of the atomic era left in the collective psyche. The shrouded outline is a haunting and uncanny representation of a covered over yet open secret .

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