Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Drawing on Karen Barad's insights on “nuclearity,” this work argues that postwar aesthetic forms, from biomorphic abstraction to the depiction of postnuclear landscapes, offer insights for technoscience to address the unsettling of matter and the plasticity of time at the heart of our nuclear age.

Paper long abstract

This article interrogates the aesthetics of the nuclear age at the intersection between cultural production and technoscience. Departing from the premise that the entanglement between nuclear science and aesthetics extends well beyond the “nuclear technoaesthetics” (Masco 2004) of postwar weapons scientists to shape “wildly divergent cultural moods, from soaring optimism to stomach-churning fear” (Boyer 2001), it decenters the debate from the oft-rehearsed discussion around the looming threat of the bomb and its corresponding “annihilation imaginary” (Lee 2025). Instead, following Barad’s (2023) insights on “nuclearity” as a technoscientific paradigm that “blows up Newtonian conceptions of space and time,” giving rise to “inherently haunted matter,” this article argues for the need to consider how postwar cultural production grappled with the transformed ontological status of matter and the plasticity of time. From biomorphic abstractions registering the unsettling of material integrity to explorations of postnuclear landscapes where catastrophe is simultaneously imminent and ongoing, postwar aesthetics offers crucial insights for technoscience, as the latter is increasingly tasked with representing, and politically articulating, both the infra-sensible and the “hyperobject” (Morton 2013), both imminent disaster and slow violence (Nixon 2011). Taking stock of renewed curatorial interest – as recent exhibitions like L’Âge atomique at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2024) demonstrate – this work interrogates the cultural imaginaries of the atom, finding new clues to address what is both imperceptible and omnipresent, both immediate and persistent.