The Reader: 75 years on, we can still learn from Hiroshima

Artists Es Devlin (left) and Machiko Weston pose next to their digital art collaboration 'The End of the World'
PA
6 August 2020

Commissioned by Imperial War Museums to make a digital art work in response to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago today, Machiko Weston and I carried out our research locked down in separate studios, in separate languages.

The resultant split-screen text-based work expresses the divisions between Japanese and British perspectives, between the atomic bomb as devastating enduring physical act and the atomic bomb as potent and enduring act of collective imagination.

HG Wells first imagined nuclear energy in his 1913 science fiction The World Set Free: he envisaged “a source of power so potent that…every scrap of solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force”.

Nuclear physicist Leo Szilard read H G Wells’s novel and fiction became fact when he patented the nuclear fission reactor in 1934 and co-wrote with Einstein the 1939 letter to Roosevelt which instigated the Manhattan Project.

Einstein reflected in 1946: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking.”

If anything can change our modes of thinking surely it’s the heart-wrenching testimonies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton writes: “Survivors have a special form of witness … what they’ve learned is the capacity of our technology to destroy.”

To view the work visit iwm.org.uk/history/i-saw-the-world-end
Es Devlin

Editor's reply

Dear Es

The testimonies of survivors can pull us up short and bring us closer to understanding the impact of acts like Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Humans find it hard to think in the macro of major events, but the micro — the personal — hits us right in the heart.

But we need a safe place to seek out those stories and there is no better medium through which to channel them than art. Your project will help to keep us on track.
Nancy Durrant, Arts Editor