Interview With a Nuclear Contract Worker

Mark Aerial Waller 

1999

Hi-8 to DigiBeta, 9min

Interview with a Nuclear Contract Worker acts as a host and paratext to Glow Boys.

This is an interview with an extra from the set of Glow Boys. He weaves a darkly humourus narration between his experience on the film set, shifting between his work in the reactor and his analysis of what he terms "the nuclear racket". Constantly in a state of flux, his conversation shifts from the film time, to the moment of being filmed, to his personal time away from the set. He is a temporal nomad, unconstrained by the controls of temporal designation.

For more information on the subject visit : http://www.metafilter.com/102084/glow-boys-nuclear-janitors-dying-for-a-living

Cast:Douglas Park

http://www.markaerialwaller.com/nuclearworker.html

Nuclear Culture on Film

Mark Aerial Waller / Isao Hashimoto / Sandra Lahire / Otolith Group / Eva & Franco Mattes / Chris Oakley / Yelena Popova

11am-5.30pm, Sunday 28 April 2013

The Arts Catalyst
50-54 Clerkenwell Road
London EC1M 5PS

A programme of artists’ films investigating nuclear culture from the perspective of the 21st Century reflecting on 1980s feminist experimental film and activism, gritty dramatic satire of the 1990s, and recent video-essay works from 2009 – 2012. Artists narrate their own experience of nuclear environments in Britain, the Urals, Estonia, Ukraine, Japan and Canada, travelling back home or to sites of disaster to try and capture the invisible or the unimaginable. Investigating the aesthetic implications of radiation reveals the impossibility of capturing an energy that bleaches the images from film and erases the hard drives of digital devices. The films raise important questions for nuclear critique from nuclear entropy, utopian and dystopian belief systems, questioning scientific certainty, political agency and the proliferation of nuclear culture. A roundtable discussion will tackle some of these issues with artists Kodwo Eshun (Otolith Group) and Mark Aerial Waller in conversation with philosopher Liam Sprod, chaired by Susan Kelly. Curated by Ele Carpenter.

Programme

11am Introduction by Ele Carpenter

11.25-12.30 The Otolith Group, The Radiant, 2012

12.30-1pm Mark Aerial Waller, Interview With a Nuclear Contract Worker, 1999 
and Mark Aerial Waller, Glow Boys, 1999

1-2pm Light lunch and Isao Hashimoto, A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945(2003).

2-2.30pm Yelena Popova, Unnamed, 2011. Introduced by Heidi Brunnschweiler

2.30-3pm Sandra Lahire, Uranium Hex, 1988 and Your Greenham, Short films, 2007. Introduced by Ele Carpenter

3-4pm Roundtable discussion: Kodwo Eshun and Mark Aerial Waller with Liam Sprod. Chaired by Susan Kelly.

4pm Tea & Coffee

4.30pm Chris Oakley, Half Life, 2009.

4.45pm Let Them Believe, 2010, Dir. Todd Chandler & Jeff Stark, featuring Eva and Franco Mattes, Ryan C. Doyle

5pm Closing remarks Susan Kelly and Ele Carpenter

5.30pm End

Curated by Ele Carpenter with students from MFA Curating, Goldsmiths: Heidi Brunnschweiller, Lucia Garavaglia, Lucy MacDonald, Laura McLean, George Vasey.

Mark Aerial Waller makes films, events and sculptural installations that seek relationships with the historical positioning of culture; that mythologically potent archival data can coexist in the area between the reconfigured present and its original home. This work includes the film Glow Boys (1999), made in part at Oldbury and Sizewell reactors, after a year's research meeting staff and contractors at BNFL sites across the UK, Midwatch (2001), where interviews with veterans of the first British nuclear weapons tests collide with  Melville's Moby Dick in a psychologically charged exchange. Waller lectures at Central Saint Martins and Norwich University of the Arts and exhibits internationally.

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5394942418?ref=ebtnebtckt