Wed Mar 12, 2025
3:00 - 4:00 pm

Please join us in the John Gaw Meem room for a live presentation with Sean J Patrick Carney about nuclearism and the cultural legacy of nuclear history adapted from his Time Zero podcast.

Time Zero is a sonic talk on nuclearism, its aesthetics, and its influence on the paranoiac cultural architecture of postwar America. From the first nuclear detonation in New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin in 1945, through decades of mutually assured destruction, to science-fiction-like visions of atomic energy powering advanced artificial intelligence platforms, to radioactive half-lives numbering tens of thousands of years, Time Zero additionally looks at the ways that the nuclear has reoriented humankind’s relationships to space and time.

This live presentation is an adapted preview of the Time Zero podcast, an episodic narrative on the legacies of nuclear weapons development and testing, uranium mining, atomic energy, and the ethical and engineering paradoxes of nuclear waste disposal. Such histories are especially acute in New Mexico, a state that has become home to every link in the nuclear fuel and weapons chain.  Available in late March, Time Zero features interviews with artists Trevor Paglen, Rose B Simpson, Richard Misrach, Joanna Keane Lopez, and more, as well as conversations with New Mexico-based activists groups including the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, Veterans for Peace Santa Fe, and Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety. Time Zero is written, researched, edited, and scored by Sean J Patrick Carney. 

Sean J Patrick Carney is an American writer, researcher, composer, and visual artist. His essays, criticism, and interviews have appeared in Artforum, High Country News, Vice, Art in America, Southwest Contemporary, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and other outlets. He teaches interdisciplinary art at the University of Florida. 

Seating is limited-Bottled water only.

Image by Sean J Patrick Carney.