At the same time, nuclear tensions between the U.S. There has been some positive news, such as the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate accord. Since we moved the clock forward, a year ago-in 2012, it was set at 11:55- developments have been mixed. The last time the clock was this close to midnight was in 1983-the height of the Cold War. It’s an expression of grave concern about how the global situation remains largely the same. The fact that the clock’s hands aren’t moving isn’t good news. It will remain set at 11:57-three minutes to midnight. This year, we’ve decided not to move the clock either forward or backward. In a statement, we wrote that “Unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity.” Last year, in January, 2015, the Bulletin set the Doomsday Clock at three minutes to midnight. This task has become even more complex in the past decade because the Bulletin has begun to explore issues beyond nuclear weapons, including climate change, bioterrorism, and cyber threats. Many disparate, worldwide factors must be judged in order to realistically assess the total existential risk facing humanity. As a result, I also work with the Bulletin’ s Science and Security Board, which, each year, decides on the position of the Doomsday Clock. I am privileged to chair the Bulletin’ s Board of Sponsors, a group of scientists, including sixteen Nobel laureates, that was created by Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer after the Second World War to advise the Bulletin. In total, in the past sixty-nine years, the clock has been changed twenty-two times, giving the world an easy way to gauge the likelihood that our species will destroy itself. At the end of the Cold War, in 1991, it was turned back to 11:43, or seventeen minutes to midnight (its furthest from doomsday). That year, it was set at 11:53, or “seven minutes to midnight.” In 1953, following American and Soviet tests of the hydrogen bomb, the clock reached 11:58, or two minutes to midnight (the closest to doomsday it’s ever been). In 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published, on its cover, a “Doomsday Clock.” The clock was designed to represent the existential threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. You are encouraged to go above, below, through, in-between and underneath.The Doomsday Clock in 2002, when it was set at 11:53. Research into Haraway’s articulation of the Chthulucene has informed the work along with a more focussed interrogation of multi-species survival with a particular focus on fungal networks and interspecies communication.įrom April onwards, I will be developing the game with Lucy Wheeler and delivering game development workshops to young people facilitated by Jazmin Morris. The project will inhabit this temporality, the time of impending apocalypse, a time in fairy-tales associated with the breaking of a spell and a time that relates to our age commonly referred to as the Anthropocene a time of great urgency and consequence. At that point, the time jumped to 3 minutes to midnight. In 2007, the Bulletin expanded the clock to include climate change as one of the greatest man-made threats to humankind. The Doomsday Clock was introduced in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and is a metaphorical, non-linear clock which represents scientists’ estimation of how close we are to global catastrophe. The space with New Art City is populated with research, conversations, world-building plans, sketches and image ideas.ģ Minutes to Midnight will be an interactive game which takes its starting point at the moment in 2007, when climate change was added as a factor affecting the Doomsday Clock. 3 Minutes to Midnight is a digital installation of research and work in progress made during the residency with De:Formal.
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