Dystopia

My idea for the following images began by playing with a Polaroid camera and polaroid 600 film I received as a present for Christmas. I thought I had used all the film and accidentally pressed the shutter whilst playing with the camera. I was close to a wall and so the photograph was wasted anyway, so I decided to play with it, going against the instructions to not shake the Polaroid and to keep it in a warm dark place for up to 40 minutes whilst it developed. I shook the film and stuck it against a window facing the sun. I then placed it in the fridge for ten minutes. I then had an idea to put it in the microwave and see what happened. After 2 to 3 seconds the film violently sparked at the edges, so I removed it from the microwave and then left it in a dark spot to finish developing.

This was the resulting image:

The pigment in the film was damaged - probably from shaking and bending the film. The white spots and blue lightning like lines I suspect were created when the Polaroid sparked in the microwave, but as I have ran out of films I cannot test this. The damage to the frame is also interesting, the burnt cracking in the bottom left of the image was made by the microwave when the film sparked. After I saw this image I was then struck with the idea of radiation and it's effects. I microwaved some of the other Polaroid images I had taken so that I had a variety of frames in which to put my location photographs. I also experimented with layering the damaged Polaroid over my images but it wasn't too effective and I didn't want all the images to have the same layered effect and so abandoned this technique.

I instead opted to use photoshop filtering to affect the images. When deciding how to do is I remembered seeing a chart in school that showed the electromagnetic spectrum similar to this chart: 

From http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/122/lecture-2/em.html

 You can see that radiation such as Microwave and Gamma radiation fall outside the visible light spectrum rendering them invisible to us. But if the visible light spectrum were to be extended and all radiation be visible how could our world look? In light of radiation disasters like Chernobyl 1986, and more recently Fukushima in 2011 if more countries began using nuclear power and further disaster happened making even more areas of our planet unsafe to inhabit, what could they look like were the radiation visible? 

In the 2005 film Batman Begins, the bad guy Scarecrow uses a weapon that uses microwave radiation to vaporise Gotham cities water supply that he has contaminated with a hallucinogenic drug. 

In this video, microwave radiation is used to light a bulb from a few feet away: 2min45 onwards http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DoOT2_Z-GIE, weaponising radiation is a terrifying thought that could potentially be made real.

In every day life, TV, radio, radar, GPS and other devices are constantly sending signals through the air, if these signals were visible what would we see? I have used the gradient map tool in Photoshop to change the colours according to the extended light spectrum. The images are partly coloured due to suitable types of radiation but also to just create a range of different coloured images for artistic effect.

Here are the original images:

For presentation I decided to use a leather wallet custom made to fit the polaroids. This was made so that the images could be stored in it and surreptitiously passed from person to person to spread the word that the dystopian government is coving up a radiation leak.