The following is an interview with Joy Garnett creator of The Bomb Project, conducted via email – September 2003:

Ryan: What was the beginning of “the bomb project” for you? Where/when did you say, “This is going to be a project.”?

Joy: In 1997 I began doing image research for an exhibition of paintings, my first solo show at Debs + Co. in New York, which consisted of U.S. nuclear test landscapes. I didn’t realize at the time how much the project would continue to progress and morph, nor how much my working methods would be influenced by this particular subject and the realms of information and secrecy and policy it would lead me to. But one thing did lead to another.

Research for the painting project eventually led to the idea for the web project; that is, my focused search for imagery fanned out and became a more generalized quest for information and context. There was only so much used-book documentation on The Bomb to be found from the era of The Bomb, so I set out to extract images and footage from more primary sources. It was around 1997 that I also got my first laptop and my first email account and I started to poke around online. After spending a few years reacclimating to the Web and amassing online resources, I realized that certain ideals and models would best be served by recontextualizing my sources in a public portal.

In the spring of 2000 I registered the domain thebombproject.org and launched a preliminary version of the site. At that stage it served as little more than a storage solution. I redesigned and relaunched it definitively in August 2002 and I’ve been continuously adding links and making improvements ever since.

RG: There is a critical engagement with science with this project, and with your other projects, like First Pulse Projects. The histories of Western science and technology are synonymous with histories of oppression and social catastrophe, one story of which is told within “the bomb project,” yet science also holds out utopian possibilities for change and liberation. Do you see aesthetic/archival projects being able to contribute to the emancipatory potentials of scientific practice?

JG: Science and art are subject to abuse. They have no built-in immunity. But oppression and social catastrophe not withstanding, the histories of Western science and technology are also synonymous with certain realized states of autonomy, which though circumscribed politically and economically, amount to much more than mere utopian fantasy. For instance, while science may be ultimately instrumental in the weaponizing of smallpox, it is also responsible for its total eradication in the wild. And while there persists a Luddite tendency in our culture to equate science and technology with oppression, images themselves–art itself–can embody a kind of oppression as well. Art has its own tradition of leading the way to war, as has been pointed out by Susan Sontag, Thomas Keenan and others. Imagine the Third Reich without Albert Speer, without Leni Riefenstahl. Imagine the Gulf War without CNN. In the case of the Cold War era where we find the primacy of the classified image to be unparalleled, we have a historical case whose global ramifications are relevant to us all.

So to me, one of the most interesting things is the intersection of visual media, science and politics. Each of these elements is transformed by intersecting with the other. The phenomenon bears study, and to conduct such study–artistic or otherwise–it is paramount to first establish a context where art, science and government are presented as interlocking and overlapping areas. This is the mandate of The Bomb Project.

Finally, the challenge of setting up an archive must draw on an appreciation of the material at hand. However ephemeral in nature, or obtuse, or diffuse, the challenge is in letting the information speak for itself, of presenting cultural artifacts while disturbing them as little as possible. The archivists project thus becomes the anthropologist’s dilemma, and unlike the artist whose job is more or less to transform, the mission here is not to meddle too much.

RG: Has anything you’ve come across in your compiling and researching caught you off guard or given you an angle on something you didn’t have before?

JG: I am repeatedly stunned by the degree of fetishization of The Bomb, and by the sheer amount of information, especially visual, which has been recorded and preserved. I’ve become interested in the phenomenon of classification and declassification; for instance, how a prior state of secrecy might affect the impact or meaning of certain images even long after they have been released.
Also, despite government secrecy from the Cold War era through to the present-day, so much material has been declassified and made available to the general public. The Bomb Project just manages to scratch the surface.
It makes me wonder how we can effectively challenge government secrecy when we’ve barely absorbed the information that is available to us.

RG: What do you think is the importance in communicating about “The Bomb” today, especially in the form that “The Bomb Project” takes?

JG: Ours is a global nuclear culture, but we have yet to fully accept that. We have aesthetisized danger and death and corruption and violence and the apocalyptic morbid side of technology. We have rendered it as fantasy and entertainment, or else as historical and therefore remote.
By specifically emphasizing the image-fetish aspect of nuclear culture, I want to show how violence and militarism are invariably tied to aesthetics and therefore to media and pop culture; military culture permeates popular culture and the arts and vice versa, and has done so for quite some time.
By contextualizing a broad spectrum of nuclear material in light of the arts I hope to provide a platform for work and study. Above all, I hope to foster awareness that these issues and responsibilities are no fantasy, but real problems that will be with us for a long time to come.