BtB Forum

We also have a few performance elements planned. This is what we've got so far:

- A piece inspired by Iannis Xenakis' Concret PH. The original piece is a close mic'd recording of coal burning which is then treated electronically. We're substituting coal for oil shale and aiming to do as much of it live as possible.

- A piece inspired by Alvin Lucier's Clocker. In a nutshell, the piece explores our viscerally subjective, physiological relationship to time by modulating a clock's ticking with delays that are controlled via galvanic skin response sensors. For our version we'll be replacing the clock with a geiger counter, thus replacing time with radiation in the conceptual framework of the piece.

We've got a couple of other performances planned too, but we'd like to get those together in our heads before we post about them.

Something to get the grey matter churning:

Another that has some relevant material...

"Supercollider" close enough for you? Not about *energy* specifically, but definitely about manipulating atoms and radiation and quantum effects:



or



or (my favorite):

http://guildofscientifictroubadours.com/2008/09/23/song-we-can-blame-peter-higgs-at-the-collider/

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Maybe just play "Atomic" on an endless loop. Everywhere. Always:

You'll find more relics here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_age#The_Atomic_Age_in_pop_culture

Did you follow my God of Concrete, God of Steel obsession a few years back? (There's an mp3 file there...)

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Reddit, just yesterday, had an "askscience" question about what really happens to the nuclear plants in the zombie apocalypse.

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Oh, and I forgot about this guy. Talk about obsession:

http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html

A boy scout became a lethal radiation addict, basically. It became a real problem when he built mini-reactors in his shed.

I promise I'll stop now... but see if you can find an academic with access to this journal article (and accompanying media):

Acoustic computer model for ultrasonic imaging of heavy liquid metal nuclear reactor

grant said: Did you follow my God of Concrete, God of Steel obsession a few years back? (There's an mp3 file there...)

You were the bloke whose God of Concrete obsession inspired me! I remember the mp3, it was a guide track so people could hear the melody, right? Did you ever find a version with people singing it?

I'm copying over your contributions from Facebook:


I really don't want to overwhelm you - there's a novel/multimedia event waiting to happen with just Fukushima material. Like... love the graphic here: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/03/fukushima_crisis_anatomy_of_a.html

And this story about the hero pensioners is simply awesome: http://guildofscientifictroubadours.com/2011/06/07/skilled-veterans-corp/

But there are also some great, imagination-inspiring stories that predate Fukushima.

Radioactive boars are a problem: http://guildofscientifictroubadours.com/2010/08/09/radioactive-boars-rising/

So are Iran's nuclear molemen:
http://guildofscientifictroubadours.com/2010/01/13/nuclear-molemen/

More mundanely, there's actually a bigger problem with nuclear waste from *coal* than nuclear power plants:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

And stuff around the Large Hadron Collider is equally huge and sort of related (what happens if you're inside?):
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-07/say-im-inside-large-hadron-collider-and-its-revving-should-i-be-concerned

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MORE useful for your ends, there are some stunning images out there.

Rapatronic nuclear test photo:
http://guildofscientifictroubadours.com/2007/11/04/science-art-rapatronic-photo-nuclear-explosion-1952/
(YOU MUST USE THAT IMAGE)

If you want to get some perspective, the Van Allen Belt is a zone of radiation that protects Earth:
http://bit.ly/meGgc9
(as well as making the Fantastic Four happen).

That's a good start, I guess. I really don't want to throw too many things at you at once.

and...

Also:



(You know Firefox has a plug-in that'll download YouTube videos as FLV files, yes?)

And you could probably run the whole installation from material from archive.org: http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=atomic+AND+mediatype%3Amovies

Please don't worry about overwhelming us... we've got a team of five people to do the sifting and collating, so right now what we need is a landslide that we can process over the course of the next four weeks or so.

Courtesy of XK: http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fworld-asia-pacific-13763601&h=e8279UPaTdRWn1edrbN3nDvVsFQ

Courtesy of grant's fearsome web-fu (FB crosspost):

That one might interface nicely with that horrible story about how they used to irradiate kids' thymus glands: http://www.radiolab.org/2008/dec/29/how-to-cure-what-ails-you/

Courtesy of Illmatic:

This should get you started.

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=36995

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=54546

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=54544

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=45388

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=54562

grant, again:

Sweet nuclear Jesus, I finally quit all this nuclear stuff, open the
next file on my desk and, no lie, this is the story that's there:

Nuclear age has led to millions of fewer baby girls being born
(Daily Mail, sorry):


* Study claims nuclear radiation from bomb testing and power plant leaks hits female birthrate

* Japanese nuclear disaster could hit girl births in U.S.

Nuclear radiation from power plant leaks and bomb tests resulted in millions fewer baby girls born worldwide, according to a new study.

Scientists noted these types of atmospheric blasts rather than on-the-ground incidents like Chernobyl, effected birth gender across the globe.

Scientists at Helmholtz Zentrum München, Germany, analysed population data from 1975 to 2007 for the U.S. and 39 European countries.
There was an increase in the number of baby boys relative to girls in all of the countries from 1964 to
1975.

This was the case in many eastern European countries for several years after 1986.

Scientists are putting the first spike down to the atomic bomb tests of the 1960s and 1970s where radioactive atoms were blasted into the atmosphere, Air currents caught these atoms and then
distributed them around the world.

They think the second spike is due to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in which the reactor exploded in the Ukraine.

The effects of Chernobyl were felt locally and no effect was seen in the U.S., probably because it was too far from the disaster to have an effect.

'The closer the country was to Chernobyl, the stronger the effect,' said study co-author Hagen Scherb, a biostatistician at the German Research Center for Environmental Health in Munich.

More males were born relative to females in Belarus - the Ukraine's neighbour - than in France.

The study is based largely on Cold War-era statistics, but the findings are highly relevant for how gender could be effected after future nuclear disasters.

And in the wake of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident experts are
predicting another baby boy boom could be imminent, especially on the U.S. West Coast.

'We do not know how much radioactivity was emitted through Fukushima and how it will spread throughout the world,' Dr Scherb said.

'Maybe it's confined to just Japan, but if it gets in the water and the air, it's possible that we could see a similar effect, especially on the West Coast of America.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1394553/Is-U-S-heading-baby-boy-boom-Japan-disaster-Study-finds-nuclear-radiation-results-millions-fewer-female-births-worldwide.html

elseware, via FB:

There's an old scifi story from 1940; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowups_Happen

Also in the idea-mix: modelling the reverberation of a power station cooling tower and/or field recordings from inside the tower.

An extended group improvisation based on the hymn God of Concrete, God of Steel, which is indeed a throwback to grant mentioning it on Barbelith years ago.

XK's actual link, unpolluted by Facebook link-gubbins: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13763601

Seth said:

grant said: Did you follow my God of Concrete, God of Steel obsession a few years back? (There's an mp3 file there...)

You were the bloke whose God of Concrete obsession inspired me! I remember the mp3, it was a guide track so people could hear the melody, right? Did you ever find a version with people singing it?

I'm touched!
Never did find another versions - though now there are many more tools. Hmmm. Perhaps I shall go a-looking!

Let me know if you come across 'owt. Although I quite like the idea of reconstructing an approximation, too.

Here are a few things. Hope they are useful!

http://mutablematter.wordpress.com/2008/04/13/in-security-%E2%80%93-materialising-radiation/

http://mutablematter.wordpress.com/2009/04/04/mixed-drinks-for-modern-times/

http://mutablematter.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/ruins-of-the-far-future/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Atomic

Also, at the Hansard Gallery there was an exhibition called 'Dark Places'...

Angela

Seth said:

elseware, via FB:

Nuclear age has led to millions of fewer baby girls being born
(Daily Mail, sorry):

* Study claims nuclear radiation from bomb testing and power plant leaks hits female birthrate

* Japanese nuclear disaster could hit girl births in U.S.


'Maybe it's confined to just Japan, but if it gets in the water and the air, it's possible that we could see a similar effect, especially on the West Coast of America.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1394553/Is-U-S-heading-baby-boy-boom-Japan-disaster-Study-finds-nuclear-radiation-results-millions-fewer-female-births-worldwide.html

Given their poor record with science stories, it might be worth tracking that one back to the source (although they do quote it in the article, which seems a Big Step Forward).
IEEE article is on its way to Seth.

|Geoff