Trinity Twins (ATOMSPHERE II)

Trinity Twins is an interactive film installation in which radioactivity transforms documentary scenes from my nuclear travels in real-time. The premiere in Germany in 2022 took place while military units were invading the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant.

In 1999, I began to explore the cultural quality of radioactivity. This journey took me to Chernobyl, Geneva, Fukushima, Hiroshima, Vienna, Paranal, Karlsruhe, Haigerloch and finally Hechingen, my birthplace and headquarters of the German uranium club at the end of World War II.

My filmic installation "Trinity Twins" documents cinematic scenes of this fleeting acquaintance with the primordial nuclear force. The omnipresent cosmic radiation, measured with a Geiger-Müller counting tube, rearranges cinematic elements in real time and transforms them into "cinematic isotopes". Each iteration is releasing the filmic documents from the constraints of linear narration introducing a quantum cinema of pure probability.

Thus, scenes of my work "Before Sunrise" with the Slovenian music group Laibach show the last days of the earth's pristine atMOsphere. In 1945, the German nuclear reactor experiment B8 in a cave in Haigerloch triggers a chain of unpredictable events: 664 uranium cubes on chains wait for criticality above a reactor pool filled with heavy water. Directly above this reactor, on a rock, is a church. The name of this church is Trinity, just like the name of the very first atomic bomb, which detonates shortly thereafter on July 16, 1945, in the desert Jornada del Muerto, the Dead Man's Path, in New Mexico.

This first atmospheric nuclear explosion is the day zero of the infossil epoch, the beginning of the transformation of the atmosphere into the atomsphere, the context in which humanity, through the application and aspired mastery of atomic processes, begins to create a new planetary environment through the transmutation of matter, machines, minds and money. In the cave in Haigerloch humanity leaves her first radioactive cave painting, painted with radioisotopes on the canvas of time, the destroyer of worlds.

It is the beginning of the epoch, which has recently been assessed as sustainable. A foolish assessment, just consider the situation 2022 in Ukraine, where nuclear power plants are being held hostage at war without any accountability for radiation safety being addressed, a mere 3 weeks following the declaration of nuclear sustainability by the European Union.

It is time to take hold of our privilege to renounce.

Welcome to the atOMsphere!