| Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear). Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming. www.ctbto.org Multimedia artwork "2053" - This is the number of nuclear explosions conducted in various parts of the globe.* Profile of the artist: Isao HASHIMOTO Born in Kumamoto prefecture, Japan in 1959. Worked for 17 years in financial industry as a foreign exchange dealer. Studied at Department of Arts, Policy and Management of Musashino Art University, Tokyo. Currently working for Lalique Museum, Hakone, Japan as a curator. Created artwork series expressing, in the artist's view, "the fear and the folly of nuclear weapons": "1945-1998" © 2003 "Overkilled" "The Names of Experiments" About "1945-1998" ©2003 "This piece of work is a bird's eye ... |
