Listening to Radiation

How does interactive media articulate what is fundamentally beyond human sensory capacity? The paper asks this in the context of Fukushima and radiation. Interactive informational media might itself hint at the answer given they run at speeds beyond human perception while nonetheless interfacing and therefore conditioning that perception apparatus. Thus, while much has been said about radiation and “silence,” this paper refuses that discursive regime, instead analyzing radiation through what Brinkema calls “the regime of near inaudibility,” a discurso-pragmatic approach to intensive relations, rather than a commitment to “being or not being.” That is, as an object restricted from immediate knowledge, radiation nonetheless becomes embodied knowledge as its existence and effects are navigated as a social force. To that end, the paper, based on field work, analyzes the way the Fukushima Commutan Center, a state-sponsored center sharing information about radiation and recovery, utilizes interactive media to produce particular embodied knowledges of radiation. I offer two examples: first, an interactive game in which children’s bodies are projected onto a screen to stop oncoming “radiation” with “blockers” (representing radiation-resistant material) mapped to their hand; and second, a spherical theatre dome covered entirely by screens and fit with surrounding speakers in which visitors stand suspended on a bridge, turning to watch the moving multi-directional video focal point. In each case, the media intend to communicate “radiation information”—the former case, “radiation protection is possible,” and the latter, “Fukushima has recovered despite radiation.” And yet, there is also, as Cecchetto puts it, an incommunicative aspect of these medias, an aesthetic, a structuring of the sensible that subtends the informational intent. This structuring, it is argued, encounters a context in visitors/users that has the potential to provoke a vaguely felt stress, anxiety, even trauma. This context irrupts in painful and fearful sensations in the otherwise celebratory media. What appears affirmative interactive media, then, manifest as a form of control conditioning the embodiment of radiation that serves the capital-nation-state. In other words, the social contract to live among radiation functions through an affective aporia where citizens are hailed to feel comfortable in that which makes them uncomfortable: the knowledge of radiation. Rather than strictly an analysis of the content of the game or dome video, the paper forwards listening to ask how formal relations in the techno-movements constitute the paradoxical (non)lived reality of radiation. How is listening, then, not a form of attention, but a form of attunement in which a resonant logic is taken up between intra-acting subject/object? This demands another question: is attunement not then also implicated in capitalism’s interactive techno-logics. Listening must be attuned to its own reality as an attunement machine for the hope of investing in the world otherwise.

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