Artwork Appreciation
The United States’ Manhattan Project successfully produced nuclear weapons, which not only hastened the resolution of World War II, but also marked the official entry of human civilization into the nuclear age. The artist Lo Sheng-Wen developed his “Falling Dust” series from this historical reality. Project Shoal comes from the nuclear bomb test explosion of the same name. The project aimed to allow scientists to obtain data after the test explosion that would enable them to develop standardized means to monitor whether other countries were complying with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The test explosion had significant impacts on the natural ecology, but because they were little reported, these historical events have tended to disappear in the public mind, as if they had never occurred. Lo used official information published by the United States to find the coordinates of the test explosion site and other information and captured a three-dimensional satellite image of it from Google Earth. After some adjustments, the traces of the nuclear test site were reproduced, and the data turned into an actual image, titled after the code name for the test explosion, to make people aware that this incident really occurred.