Art based on criticality experiments of the early 1940s at Los Alamos National Laboratory are on exhibit starting this month at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The installation, called Critical Assembly, emits sound and visual effects to mimic Geiger counters and contains some of the original laboratory furniture and equipment. The artifacts in Critical Assembly were purchased from scientists and machinists who worked on the Manhattan Project. Washington, DC, artist Jim Sanborn has spent the past five years constructing Critical Assembly, which is part of his larger art exhibit, Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction.
The rest of the exhibit includes a series of abstract autoradiographs that Sanborn created by exposing film to lumps of uranium, as well as images of radium-dial alarm clocks made between 1920 and 1950. The images appear cobalt blue, to symbolize Čerenkov radiation the soft blue glow that appears in...
