Post-atomic Auralities: A practice-based study of sound and atmospheric effects

This practice-based research investigates the aural connections of sound, temperature, radioactivity and atmosphere. It is sustained by a central question that asks: What are the connections between sound and the nuclear, and how might novel methodologies for sound arts practice activate these relationships?

This research aims to discover how sound and atmospheric conditions interact within sites of nuclear significance and explores the often complex and unique cultures and consequences that emerge from them. This process includes exploring places that are imbued with nuclear histories, many of which remain active sites with complex and unique cultural heritages. The practice I present navigates a path from a series of experimentations with Geiger counters within my workshop space, to citizen data projects and remote sensing, to the development of a ‘nuclear archive’, where digitalmaterial representations of radionuclides and sonic ethnographies of Cold War era bunkers are combined. I explore the geological, historical, cultural, and technological significance of the nuclear to develop new methodologies for sound arts practice that document and attune to the many interrelations of sound and the post-atomic - a term that is widely accepted as descriptive of everything that has existed or occurred after the advent of nuclear weapons.

Through my practice I will introduce ‘documentation as praxis’ as an approach for reconfiguring the roles and function of the site and act of making, while querying the boundaries of documentation in arts practice. In conducting this aural investigation, I aim at discovering where the timelines and consequences of radioactive materials and their enduring cultural effects can be revealed by their sonic potential. This thesis coalesces in the development of my concept of ‘noise-prints’, where documentation and recorded media are activated as wayfinding instruments that are made traceable to the post-atomic auralities that I have uncovered.