The Hiroshima Project

Akke Wagenaar


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Abstract:
I would like to present my WWW-site "The Hiroshima Project", which deals with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and the vast range of effects these events have had on the world in the past 50 years (such as contamination and radiation, nuclear arms race and non-proliferation).

The Hiroshima Project is an information project: it links all WWW sites in the world which have information about the atomic bomb - it does not add any new information. It juxtaposes contradictory information, connects opposing opinions, and unites complementary parts. It leads the visitor systematically along hundreds of worldwide links.

The Hiroshima Project touches all subtopics of the Media and Ethics symposium. I would like to address these various aspects with the Hiroshima Project as a starting point:

what space is the Hiroshima Project operating in?
what kind of project is it? art? science? information ? network?
or are these categories no longer useful? and why?
how should such a work be interpreted?

The Hiroshima Project lays bare an inherent connection between technology and politics. Without computers, the first nuclear weapons could not have been developed. Nuclear weapons are technology. The development of communications technologies served military strategies in the first place. The Internet was created for military purposes. Did the information explosion already start when the first atomic bomb exploded? What is the relation between nuclear technology and the information explosion? What are the political and ethical implications of the information explosion? I would like to address these questions, and discuss the implications they have for our use and interpretation of media technology.


Biography:
Akke Wagenaar was born 1958 in the Netherlands. In 1990 she moved to Germany to work and teach at the Institut für Neue Medien in Frankfurt am Main. In 1993 she was a fellow at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany, where she has been teaching also. Currently she is living in Cologne, and in Groningen (the Netherlands), where she is a professor at SCAN, a post-graduate institute for media art and design. She started working in the field of video and computer art in 1987, soon focusing her interest on (interactive) installations and (programmed) animations. In 1995 she also started working on WWW projects. Her work has been exhibited and published in Europe, North-America and Japan. She won several grants and awards (Prisma Kulturpreis, Wiener Kompositions Wettbewerb, Prix Ars Electronica, MIT's Portrait in Cyberspace).
links:
akke@desk.nl
http://www.desk.nl/~akke
http://www.desk.nl/~akke/hiroshimaProject

updated Nov.10.96
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