Home » For and about students » Techne Community » Techne Students list » TECHNE Students 2020-2021 » Daniel Beck
AHRC Techne funded doctoral student
The Postatomic Ear: A practice-based study of sound and atmospheric effects in the Nuclear Age.
Year of enrolment: 2020
Email: dan@iless.eu
As an atmospheric effect, sound continually moves, manipulates, excites, travels and interacts directly with other perceptible elements within our surroundings. At the inception of the Nuclear Age, the Trinity nuclear test brought this connection into focus with a detonation that produced a wave of sound, heat and radioactive fallout that tore across the deserts of New Mexico, USA. In the years subsequent to this moment, the Nuclear Age has continued to be defined by a narrative of thermal effects; within a generation, humankind oversaw a transition from the fear and suspicion of the ‘Cold War’ to apathy and deception in the face of a planetary crisis of global warming. While the thermal and the nuclear continue to be linked and perceived as an imminent threat, the audible has been widely ignored as an influencing factor within the societal framework of a postatomic world.