Dr Michael Mulvihill is a Research Associate at the University of Newcastle's. His recent project, 'Turning Fylingdales Inside Out: making practice visible at the UK’s ballistic missile early warning and space monitoring station' was a multimedia art project intending to demystify nuclear weapons through showing that they are made of everyday materials: the original panel sections of the geodesic domes covering RAF Fylingdales were made of laminated cardboard, for example.
In our discussion, Michael explained that the pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear sides often mirror each other in their rhetoric by showing powerful images of nuclear weapons. Whereas by revealing the mundanity of nuclear construction through his audio-visual and very tactile artwork, Michael's work helps to break this spell and remind us that nuclear weapons are human created things that we control, not some godlike structure that rules over us. We built them, so we can take them apart too.
We also talked about the BBC Arena documentary, A British Guide to the End of the World, based on Michael's PhD thesis, which covered British nuclear testing at Christmas Island and the effects it had on British forces participants who were there at the time.
Questions
I very much connected with your story of trying to run home from school within the four minute warning. Similarly, I think seeing RAF Fylingdales and RAF Menwith Hill on childhood trips to Scarborough planted subconscious questions around nuclear war that emerged years later in my PhD thesis. To what extent do you feel your work is an attempt to gain some kind of control over that fear of nuclear war that concerned you so much as a child?
Do you feel that your sculptures and artwork are an attempt to gain close-at-hand control over global forces of nuclear deterrence?
To what extent do you feel that your work is an attempt to create a nomadic war machine to disrupt the assemblages of nuclear war? Something akin to Deleuze and Guittari’s Warrior-Animal-Weapon as Artist-Hair-Paintbrush?
Can we overcome what Gunter Anders calls the ‘Promethean gap’ between the embodied limits of human imagination and the enormous powers that nuclear weapons bestow, whereby ‘We can bomb to shreds hundreds of thousands, but we cannot mourn or regret them’?
