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Paper short abstract

Images shape and is shaped by cultural imaginations of nuclear disaster. Within visual studies, the term 'nuclear renaissance' is insufficient. Rather than utopian visions of clean energy, we encounter bizarre motifs of ruin and hurt. How does this visuality operate alongside the renaissance ideals?

Paper long abstract

The presentation draws on my recently published dissertation, Nuclear Baroque, which analyzes the visual aftermath of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster. Using Chornobyl as its point of reference, it highlights one key finding: the fabulously sublime. This concept is proposed as a subcategory of the classical sublime and the “nuclear sublime.” I argue that encounters with the nuclear sublime most often depend on distance—temporal, spatial, and mediated—rather than proximity. Instead, the fabulously sublime encompasses mediated modes of sublime experience: the imaginative, spectacular, and sometimes bizarre visual forms through which nuclear power and catastrophe are made sensorially graspable. As such, it constitutes a foundational pillar of what the dissertation conceptualises as the nuclear baroque.