An investigation into radiation as both residue and revelation.
Research Book 2B
Workflow tutorial: creating light sensitive materials in Blender.
The group project of the semester, developed under the key word composition, inspired by the golden ratio. It explores harmonious proportions and balance in design processes, through the creation of light sensitive artworks.
To share our approach, we created a detailed tutorial explaining our workflow step by step, making the concepts and techniques accessible and clear.
Radiation as a Hybrid Phenomena.
Radiation moves through machines, organs, and generations, acting as both a physical and biological agent of change.
It degrades electronic components over time, disrupting circuits, memory systems, and sensors.
In living organisms, radiation can damage DNA, alter cellular processes, and contribute to long-term health effects, including cancer and genetic mutations passed across generations.
Radiation operates across timescales — immediate in its effects on technology, gradual and cumulative in its biological and ecological consequences — leaving behind a persistent, silent, presence anywhere it passes.
It then developed into researching the effects of radiation on plants, with a case study into Vigna Radiata
My research this semester started with exploring the abandoned Soviet nuclear powered lighthouses scattered around the arctic coast.
I then started a dive into the events of Chernobyl not just as a closed catastrophic historic event, but as a residue; ongoing, and deeply entangled with the infrastructures of capitalism and control.
Research Question
How can the invisible motions and mechanisms behind radiation be made emotionally and culturally legible through personal and artistic translation?
“The atom shall serve peace and progress”
- Victor Koretsky
1955
Inspired by Soviet visual language, I designed ceramic vessels decorated in a reinterpreted propaganda style. Instead of glorifying state power, the illustrations reveal how that same power was used to deceive, conceal, and distort.
The imagery offers both a critique and an exposure, handing the tools of distortion back to the audience in plain sight.
I reimagined Baci di Perugina chocolates—symbols of Italian romantic culture—as vessels of post-nuclear residue.
Their familiar love notes were replaced with rewritten fragments of suppressed documents, state secrets, and censored testimonies. This intervention turns a corporate object of affection into a carrier of uncomfortable truths.
Placing the Baci Perugina into the container depicting the italian story, I aimed to transform a familiar object of affection into a carrier of contamination, not of hope, but of testimony.
Transforming the intimate he intimate ritual of eating into a moment charged with paranoia and awareness, exposing the hidden histories and ongoing presence of radiation beneath everyday life.