In 1932, the world’s first particle accelerator debuted at Cambridge in the United Kingdom, achieving the first-ever artificial nuclear fission in history. Simultaneously, the cyclotron built by American physicist Ernest Lawrence was fired up at Berkeley, ushering humanity into the accelerator era. In 1934, Bunsaku Arakatsu at Taihoku Imperial University constructed Asia's earliest particle accelerator, sweeping Taiwan into the timeline of the global nuclear tech race. This is not merely a history of scientific instruments, but a story of how infrastructure is deployed, experienced, and ultimately forgotten under the military-industrial complex.

Twenty years later, in the Nevada desert of 1955, the United States built "Doom Town" to simulate nuclear blast scenarios. That same year, with U.S. backing, Taiwan constructed its first postwar nuclear reactor at National Tsing Hua University, laying the foundation for a national narrative of technocratic developmentalism. Destruction and progress, dread and promise—synchronized with national infrastructure through the imagination of nuclear energy and weaponry—constituted the dual rhetoric of the Cold War.

This lecture approaches the subject through three works from the C-LAB Annual Exhibition: Taiwan's HSU Che-Yu and CHEN Wan-Yin utilize 3D scanning to reconstruct the residual images of Arakatsu’s accelerator, conjuring the ghosts of colonial scientific infrastructure; Lithuania’s Emilija Škarnulytė employs a cross-species gaze to refract nuclear ruins into non-human ecological time; and South Korea’s HONG Jin-Hwon superimposes images of U.S. military bases in South Korea with the Nevada test sites, revealing how the Cold War embeds itself into contemporary landscapes through the form of "latency." Together, these three works pose a vital question: when "acceleration" becomes the temporal politics of empires and capital, how do the accelerated—colonies, ecosystems, and local communities—use media to preserve the sensory forms and temporalities that refuse to be subsumed into official archives?

Time：06/20（Sat）14:00-16:00
Venue：R102 Coworking Space
Speaker：Lawrence Z. YANG
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Speaker Bio

▌Lawrence Z. YANG

Lawrence Z. YANG is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. He received his PhD in East Asian Studies from UC Berkeley with a concentration in Critical Theory and Film and Media Studies. He was Hou Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. His research spans Cold War Taiwan media and literature, infrastructure studies, propaganda culture, and environmental humanities. His articles and criticism have appeared in Symploke, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Chung-Wai Literary Quarterly, Journal of Taiwan Literary Studies, Voice of Photography, and Fa: Film Appreciation, with book chapters in Becoming the Us of Taiwan (National Cheng Kung University Press) and An Unlikely Trajectory: Literary and Cultural Leftism in Taiwan (SUNY Press). He has held visiting scholar positions at UC Irvine, the Institute of Taiwan History at Academia Sinica, and the National Taiwan Library.

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