Eternal Care

Beyond Innovation and Use, or Why We Must Follow Technologies through Time

“…The cumulative phasing out of nuclear power plants, whether because of age or political disapproval, together with the nuclear landscapes created and left behind by the atomic age have stimulated a boom in nuclear history and a new field-nuclear cultural heritage studies (Ross 2023;Bensaude-Vincent et al 2022;Kasperski and Storm 2020;Brown 2013;Hecht 2012). The challenges of "nuclearity", as well as other long-term toxic legacies, have made researchers more aware of the temporal dimensions at stake and helped them differentiate various timescales.…”

Nuclear memory: Archival, aesthetic, speculative

“…Second includes the critical problem of understanding who the subject of nuclear memory is; that is, what subject(s) – human and non-human – will bear responsibility for managing and caring for nuclear memory communication practices into the future (Brylska 2020; Kasperski and Storm 2020; Storm 2019)? We see this problem as demanding investigation into how communicating memory along 100,000 year time horizons is legitimised at an institutional level.…”

“…First is that nuclear memory demands attention to alternative onto-epistemologies of time and temporality . Key here is the possibility to explore alternative ontologies of time beside chronological time (Bastian 2019; Glowczewski 2016; Kasperski and Storm 2020), including through recent research into geo-ontologies (Joyce 2020; Povinelli 2021; Yusoff 2013) and conceptualisations of the mnemo-technical capacities of the earth (Szerszynski 2019). This focus on alternative onto-epistemologies of time sometimes suggests a certain existential thrill associated with accessing deep temporal horizons – especially where the enduring materialities of nuclear waste are seen to offer fresh perspectives on durations of time besides the human condition (Gordon 2021; Ialenti 2020).…”