Archaeologies of the Future

At the end of Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė's 2019 short film "t_1/2 ," a long-shot of a bedazzled mermaid draws us out to calm, open waters. From our aerial vantage point, the water's ripples mark time like tree rings, with the scale of seconds instead of years. Like much of the film, for which Škarnulytė won the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, the scene unfolds slowly, but the pace creates tension rather than boredom. The figure swims away, ever closer to the top edge of the screen, until the motion ends with ripples and her left arm arrested and waiting.

The mermaid provokes a weird turn, in the strictest sense of the word: bizarre, unearthly, supernatural. Unaware in my first screening that these were the final minutes of the film, I wondered where we could possibly go next. Though the title, "t_1/2," may indicate nuclear time—since the notation refers to half-life, or the duration for the radioactivity of specific isotopes to fall to half its original value—what the viewer understands almost immediately is that Škarnulytė takes us on a tour of uncanny aerial views, fantastic interiors, and subterranean worlds. There is no dialogue or paratext to guide us on this tour. Instead, the shifting sets and scenes, motions, sounds—dominated by ambient whirs—keep us asking, Where have we been? Where are we going now?

"t_1/2 " conjures nearly unimaginable nuclear futures with archaeological and geological methods for apprehending time and narrative, where chronologies run in reverse to create stories based on what remains. The film begins with an aerial view of a landscape. Distant and indistinct trees below create a camouflage topography. Our perspective zooms in and out, scans the field as would a bomber or drone. But then the textures come into focus to reveal Etruscan cemeteries—discrete monumental tombs cut in rock covered by tumuli—from once-thriving civilizations that date roughly from the 9th to 1st century BCE. "t_1/2 " doesn't reveal the interior tombs, but instead cuts to an apparatus that drills downward while the camera pans along serial panels of flashing red. The motion mimics something of an archaeological drive, to dig into and uncover, but instead runs with the propulsion of fracking or deep-core drilling. We have moved from ruin to machine.

A multitude of wires, moving parts, and a digital grid with Cyrillic script suggest a system at work and monitored. The next scene reveals another grid: this one metal, material, flat on the ground, with intermittent numbered and painted squares. Viewers familiar with nuclear technology may recognize this sited landscape as an RBMK reactor, much like the one that failed and led to the 1986 disaster at the power plant in Chernobyl. The RBMK reactor (this one from the decommissioned Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania) signifies the remains of a flawed and deadly design that caused mass death.

From the stillness, an animated facility appears, with bright and sterile fluorescent lights, cobalt blue doors that open like portals into another dimension full of orange casks in neat rows, and the film's first human presence. A computerized voice over a loudspeaker offers instructions, initially clear, but then obscured by more noise, as a human rides a forklift-like device in the distance between the casks, which store spent nuclear fuel. The interim spent-fuel storage facility is designed to provide stable and secure storage of radioactive waste before it is reprocessed or disposed. The half-life of uranium 238, the stable form of spent nuclear fuel, is over four billion years.

Throughout "t_1/2," Škarnulytė captures the unimaginable duration and deadly potential of deep nuclear time. For once, humans don't reside at the center of the narrative to orchestrate pace, create conflict, and find resolution. Even if humans dreamed up the technologies and multi-dimensional spaces the film features, the Western story arc will not survive what is to come. In this sense, scholars of the fantastic will find...