Operation Whetstone/Sulky, Nevada National Security Site, USA (1964)

作品賞析

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. The fallout and radiation from nuclear test explosions had significant impacts on the natural ecology of the test areas, but because they were seldom reported, this part of history disappeared in the public mind—it was almost as if it did not exist. 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. As he has done for other places, he transformed the data from the nuclear test site into an actual image, titled after the code name for the test explosion, which was equivalent to an explosion of 51,000 kilotons of TNT. This test was to allow scientists to study the spread of radiation.