Art intersects with "Big Science"

At 5:29:45 am Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb exploded one hundred feet over a portion of the southern New Mexico desert known as the Jornada del Muerto – the Journey of the Dead Man. The site of which Oppenheimer named "Trinity". Oppenheimer later said this name was from one of John Donne's (1572–1631) Holy Sonnets. Donne’s sonnet opening: “Batter my heart, three-person'd God” ruefully encapsulates the project’s quest to split atomic particles. On seeing the fireball and mushroom cloud, J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled a passage from Hindu sacred scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become death the destroyer of worlds." In Critical Assembly artist Jim Sanborn has recreated one of the labs used in the Trinity experiment for Terror and the Sublime: Art in an Age of Anxiety at the Crawford Gallery of Art, Cork, but is this art? Sanborn thinks it is. Sanborn spoke of the “seductive” quality of the Trinity project for the scientific community involved. In his guided tour he explained that the Los Alamos scientists employed artists to craft the precision pieces that armed the bomb. On close inspection, Sanborn's replica of the bomb sphere is a precision piece of engineering and craftsmanship – gold was used as an insulator in the bomb head. Good design is thus equated with technological development and progress. It is this tension between the beauty of the objects and their catastrophic effects on Hiroshima and its overarching historial effect down to the contemporary "War on Terror" that makes this instillation simultaneously intriguing and chilling.

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