On a bright day the sun radiates blue and violet media, refracting waves of uninterrupted sunlight. Yet when the temperature is below ten degrees, a meteorological inversion occurs, and cooler layers of water vapour become trapped, unable to rise to the warmer air above. Normally invisible pollutants transmute into a visible tawny smudge to my eye and camera over Tāmaki Makarau (Auckland); a photochemical reaction to sunlight between volatile organic compounds, sulphur and nitrogen oxides. The colour exposures in the sky reveal how much sunlight is absorbed below, and how much visible light reflects back into deep space through unnatural hazing. Earthly bodies, vehicles and factories constantly inflect this tainted canopy. The opacity of our waterways too visibly reveals the level of toxins generated by our infrastructure, both agricultural and urban.

What is invisible to the eye is nuclear radiation in the atmosphere; radiation reaches the earth via cosmic rays from the sun’s giant nuclear reactor. Radiation is emitted by some rocks, all animals (including humans), and absorbed by soil and plants. However, the radioactive nuclear particles circulating globally in Earth's stratosphere and in our lands and waters primarily originate from anthropogenic, unnatural sources: nuclear weapons testing and nuclear accidents. Toxic air and waters with elevated radioactive traces of superphosphate or nuclear particles operate as mediatic drivers of a growing number of artworks, including the photographic, video and sculptural works considered here. Following philosopher Rosi Braidotti, these images can be understood as hybrid medianaturecultures on a tainted continuum.¹

This article considers how air and water ecologies respond to a mélange of anthropogenic forcings that are exposed in artists’ images. Registrations of colour and invisible chemistry in our camera-eye-body evidence a biosphere in turmoil. I consider five contemporary artists: Fiona Amundsen, Amos Gebhardt, Kate van der Drift, Susan Schuppli and Gaurav Jai Gupta who keep environmental harm in the public sphere. In their artworks, accidental hazing or the voile accidentel reveals latent traces of nuclear radiation, biogeochemical leachate or smog, and the chance testimonies of matter in the x-rayed bones of animals who have met with human-induced accident. Tainted-ness in artworks is posited as an expressive catalyst for the multiple crises in our atmosphere, land and water.

The Tainted Radiant

Inadvertently, over eighty years ago, a tainted image revealed material truths about the ecological effects of nuclear radiation in the form of tropospheric fall-out. Following the detonation of the experimental atom bomb in New Mexico by the American military on 16 July, 1945, a radioactive contaminant was found in strawboard material used by Kodak for packaging sensitive photographic X-ray films. This discovery was not reported until four years later, when J. H. Webb published an article in Physics Review (1949), entitled ‘The Fogging of Photographic Film by Radioactive Contaminants in Eastman Kodak’s Cardboard Packaging Materials.’² The cardboard for transporting Kodak film was manufactured in a paper mill at Vincennes, Indiana, on the Wabash River. X-ray film packed inside the strawboard showed fogged spots after about two weeks' exposure. Webb and his scientific colleagues concluded that the radioactive contaminant that affected the packaging was most likely to be a wind-borne fission; nuclear particles emanating from the atom-bomb detonation which found its way into the mill through the river waters. The winds mixed and broadly distributed the radioactive materials, just as scientists predicted before the first detonation.³ When the radioactive debris was found to contaminate neighbouring grainfields in the USA, testing was moved to Aolepān Aorōkin Ṃajeḷ (Marshall islands). There, the vast expanse of Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) was argued to have capacity to absorb nuclear fallout across some 5,000 miles.⁴ This discovery was unsurprisingly supressed by Kodak, but the fogged film verifies the presence of radioactive nuclear media. Today, Indigenous descendants of those who lived nearby, in both New Mexico and the Pacific see this ‘testing’ as deliberate poisoning.

At a Pacific Peace Conference in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2024), Hinamoeura Morgant-Cross, an activist and politician from Ma’ohi nui in the Tahitian diaspora, spoke about her leukaemia as a bodily legacy of the French atomic tests in Mururoa, eighty years on.  She asserts: ‘We need to make the connection between all the cancers we suffer and France’s nuclear weapons legacy very clear. I want our people to know that we are at high risk of radiation-induced diseases.’⁵ Morgant-Cross advocates for the removal  of the word ‘test’ from nuclear testing, because the material manifestations on bodies and eco-systems are undisputed. Sometimes up to eight members in one family downwind from testing could have cancer, devastating embodied evidence of the effects of atmospheric and underwater nuclear detonations. 

Just as cardboard Kodak boxes and human bodies evidence radioactive isotopes of carbon, caesium, strontium, and plutonium, so do plant and water bodies, both immediately after nuclear fallout is dispersed by wind and in the tainted DNA carried across generations. The nuclear legacy is remembered by artist Fiona Amundsen, who has been investigating the present day traces of radioactivity in images developed with seawater in Guåhan (Guam), downwind from United States nuclear testing the Aolepān Aorōkin Ṃajeḷ (Marshall islands). In the large-scale print Palm Tree near Merizo Pier, Guam (2,121 stomachs), the number 2121 in Amundsen’s title is the number of nuclear tests conducted worldwide and connects to the embodied experience of cancers due to radiation poisoning.

Amundsen’s ten images in Blowing in the Wind (2023- 2025) are catalysed by light-sensitive film which is fogged by seawater from specific sites in Guåhan that hold trace residues of radiation.  The title refers to the military language of a  ‘downwinder’—a person or community exposed to radioactive materials that are unleashed nearby. The light-scattered images include palm trees, tree roots near nuclear bomb storage facilities and a close-up of the tarmac of Abel runway, where American aircrafts carrying the nuclear warheads that would destroy thousands of lives, departed for Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The images are developed using salt water collected from Melesso’ Pier and Cocos Lagoon in Southern Guåhan. Radioactive military hardware was taken to Cocos Lagoon for decontamination after United States testing in Aolepān Aorōkin Ṃajeḷ (Marshall islands). During the film’s development, Amundsen interposed chemiluminescence producing white spots of fogging which became embedded in the film’s emulsion, invoking the nuclear flash.⁶ Chemiluminescence taints the film’s skin, analogous to the way nuclear radioactivity lies latent in the body’s genetic material over generations, made tangible in the image of skin cells in Amundsen’s series.

In Inadvertent Images, Peter Geimer reflects on how darkroom accidents found in hazes—streaks, spots, and fogs, have historically been viewed as residual messages from the afterlife. He revisits French physicist René Colson’s term voiles accidentelles (accidental hazes), understood as the photographer’s enemy, suggesting the demonisation of a chemical-physical process.⁷ Instead, Amundsen invites present and past residues to act on the film to communicate activist messages about the nuclear half-life that impinges so catastrophically on the present. Guåhan is still an occupied territory of the United States and the radioactive exposures make visible the racist-imperialist ideologies that live on in continued nuclear militarisation. They also highlight the fight for compensation for radiation poisoning of the Marshall islanders, Morgant-Cross, and many peoples in Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa. 

Amundsen cites artist and researcher Susan Schuppli’s notion of a material witness, or act of witnessing, where, in this case, she finds physical nuclear testimonies in irradiated materials, growing trees, bodies, and sea-water after military incursions. Schuppli suggests that ‘mediatic’ interactions are aways happening between machinic and environmental ecologies in the more-than-human realm. An oil spill, for example, is a 'mediatic agent comprised of hydrocarbon atoms interacting with water.’⁸ Schuppli’s video trilogy Trace Evidence (2016) exposes the geological, meteorological, and hydrological appearance of nuclear evidence buried within matter. The series traverses natural nuclear fission discovered at the uranium mine site in Oklo, Gabon (1972), the anthropogenic catastrophe of Chernobyl’s airborne contaminants detected at the Forsmark power plant in Sweden (1986), and the five-year journey of caesium-137 and -134 from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear melt-down (2011) through the waters of the Pacific to Toquaht territory in Canada.

While Schuppli uses voiceover, radio news reporting and soundscape to tell these parallel narratives, Amundsen uses titling, and in her video work, interviews to extend the meaning inherent in the radioactive media that produces her images. Both artists avoid the spectacular image of the nuclear mushroom cloud, used repeatedly to normalise and sensationalise nuclear power dynamics in the Cold War. Detonations of nuclear bombs continued for fifty years (1946-96) in unceded parts of Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa by Britain, France and the USA, including open-air testing in Australia. Amundsen’s large-scale digital prints were installed on structures in Parliament gardens, Naarm, Melbourne, a city within the 5000-mile radius of  nuclear fallout from British testing in Maralinga.

X-ray revision

Also in south-eastern Australia, Amos Gebhardt uses archives of radiant light to honour and foreground the creatures of land, sky, and salt and freshwater in Wadawurrung country—lives suddenly cut short by fatal human intervention in their worlds. In Memory of Stars (2023) is a series of fourteen images of light-infused skeletons of deceased, indigenous animals, including a wallaby, speckled maskray, possum, flounder, cockatoo, moray and dragonfish. Gebhardt’s images fuse archival X-ray images from veterinary and scientific archives, such as the CSIRO for marine life, and long-exposure digital imaging of the cosmos, cloud, smoke and fire made on Wadawurrung Country.⁹ X-rays are a type of ionising radiation produced by electromagnetic waves that allow us to see what lies beneath the skin, first discovered in 1895. The radiated images cast the finely detailed flesh and bone in shades of black and white, depending on how different tissues absorb differing amounts of radiation. Close scrutiny reveals that these animals are maimed by human-inflicted injuries from lawnmowers, fishhooks, vehicles and firearms. The interrupted symmetry of their fragile bones is set within a starry swirl of earthly and cosmological elements, reminding us of the acceleration of more-than-human loss in our midst.

The electrical cables of the black framed LED lightboxes are looped together in one installation of In Memory of Stars, entwining the terrestrial, airborne and marine creatures together with stars in motion behind. My eyes rove from the long fangs of the dragonfish to the hollow white eye cavity of a cockatoo, poised with its broken wing, as if ready to take flight. The cloud-suffused possum skeleton raises its paws, perhaps in supplication, while the flounder appears in a swarm of seaweed-like cloud, and the maskray might be swimming in the rippling darkness. To sense these beings and radiant energy as part of ourselves, rather than externalising nature, is implicit in many Indigenous cosmologies, and also in a Western pantheistic lineage, where matter and biota are alive and self-determining, as ancestor or agent.

These X-rays reveal that animal death by ‘accident’ is as much a misnomer as the nuclear test, as roadkill in a car-dominated landscape, or the inevitable bycatch while fishing. Gebhardt suggests,

dominant societies are haunted by that which they attempt to erase. By enhancing the luminosity of these once animated bones with elements, the work suggests the entangled lines of connection between cosmology, trauma and sentience.¹⁰ 

The bodies of these creatures are often wilfully hidden, swept away and buried, but the radiant X-ray reveals the colonial violences that cannot be erased. The taint here is a cosmic residue of signals from the past, and post-production techniques of digital opacity emulate the voile accidentel in order to extend an interrupted life. In several of Gebhardt’s images the moment of death is infused with images of the cosmological trace element of fractured calcium. Calcium is present in the tender bones of these long-deceased animals and in the calcium-rich, rare supernovas in distant space that catalysed life on this planet, linking deep time and the present. Gebhardt describes bones as the residues of the explosive death and afterlife of stars.

Theorist Mieke Bal finds value in revisiting images from the past, in this case by dwelling in the archives where we might find critical messages to inflect the present. Gebhardt’s images enlist historical accidents that might revise the future, or enable us to contemplate unrealised futures. Bal plays with the phrase ‘preposterous history’, a non-linear process where images that appear chronologically first, operate as an aftereffect in the images of later artists.¹¹ We can see through the animals’ bodies in these augmented X-rays, although they are technical images designed to expose the cause of sudden death, instead we find present-future lives infinitely extended through digital recompositing. With care, the miraculous detail of each interrupted living existence is brought into the light.

Tainted Rivers

In Aotearoa New Zealand’s natural and unnatural ecosystem, Kate van der Drift’s cameraless river exposures reveal the taint in freshwater in her Soundings series. Vividly coloured abstract chromogenic prints are site-specific registrations of pollutants in the Piako river. The washes in the large-format film images are tainted by agricultural runoff and introduced chemicals from the surrounding land use for mass dairy farming. van der Drift describes the images as field recordings: a reading of the current state of the freshwater river and wetland. There has been intensive dairy farming in the Hauraki Plains and Kopuatai wetland, through which this river runs, following the seizure  of this region during colonial sovereignty wars. The synthetic fertilisers used to stimulate grass for livestock also contain trace levels of radiation.

The process of collecting images from the Piako river water involves the partial suspension of a lightproof case underwater holding a 4 x 5 inch negative film sheet for two and four weeks. The sensitive negative picks up drifting microorganisms in organic detritus, algae and farm runoff from the Hauraki Plains in the central North Island. Once the film has gradually accreted the action of water currents and sediment, shielded from the light, the images are taken back to the darkroom in a sediment-covered container. In the course of toxic exposure, the salts, bacteria  and nitrates from animal waste produce clouds of vivid alchemical reactions. The negative film is hand-processed to contact print, exposed to light, enlarged and transformed into a multi-hued chromogenic image.¹² In the process of magnification and rendering the horizontal river to a vertical wall, a story of a toxic river is brought to light, making visible the biogeochemistry of the water. van der Drift suggests that radioactive traces of superphosphate are fluorescing on her light-sensitive negatives. Environmental chemists have discovered that agricultural superphosphates deliver elevated levels of chemicals including ‘the heavy metal cadmium, the reactive element fluorine, and a low-level radioactive load associated with the elements uranium, thorium, radium and some potassium-40’.¹³

The stain of colonisation endures in the lands throughout Aotearoa; the former bushlands have been terraformed, leaving rivers unswimmable for humans because of dangerously high toxins and untenable for many forms of biota. For the Indigenous Waikato people of Tainui, and Ngāti Hako of Hauraki, the mauri, or lifeforce of river ancestors—and therefore all humanity—has been compromised. van der Drift engaged with Ngāti Hako, walking and talking with them alongside the Piako river. Her titles, such as Waxing Gibbous to Waxing Crescent, November 2022 II, 37°25'47.4"S 175°30'39.2"E records the cosmic time of moon phases while the film was immersed in water, prior to the Western scientific coordinates and the Gregorian calendar.

In a review of van der Drift’s Soundings, Alena Kavka writes: ‘The history of landscape representation in New Zealand has been defined by a European impulse to separate, objectify, and illuminate, whereas the reality of being in this country as descendants of settlers (Tāngata Tiriti) is something that is more akin to the reality of swamplands—something darker, less clear, more prone to the ontological quandaries of wetness.’¹⁴ Kavka encourages New Zealanders, as Tāngata Tiriti to embrace illegibility, a state of not knowing, as a productive orientation to this land, ‘allowing the land to speak, and us to listen.’¹⁵ The images register the unleashing of introduced biota and chemical farming, exposing past and present stains on the pastoral ideal of a rural river. van der Drift’s cameraless approach implies more-than-human agency over the chance results; a ‘landscape’ photograph is not taken, rather these tainted images co-evolve slowly and idiosyncratically; they are given. 

The Tainted Invisual

The tainted image emerges through digital as well as analogue visioning processes. Schuppli’s later work Not Planet Earth (2021) uncovers environmental pollutants and signs of warming in a remote, seemingly pristine environment during a Northern polar expedition. Mediatic interactions manifest unexpectedly in thermal images while the artist was recording icebergs at sea near Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic. Schuppli’s voiceover describes the thermal camera as a mode of sense perception that we might consider ‘unnatural’ as it reveals the surprising heat of the blue-cold dense icebergs. She narrates: ‘…thermal inversions are the direct consequences of Arctic warming, an anthropogenic reversal of temperature that changes the optical properties of sunlight, and with it the very conditions of vision.'¹⁶ While the rational mind tells us we are looking at cold, frozen objects, the false-coloured data of radiant heat taints that certainty. Our eye-body feels their rapid warming, and below the ice, nuclear submarines pass. The recorded image is also tainted by aberrations of lens crystallisation and black carbon deposits from seawater.

Artists often repurpose the intended function of their image-making tools, amplifying technological aberrations or rendering their intended purpose indeterminate, as seen earlier in Gebhardt’s use of X-ray and long-exposure digital imaging. Jussi Parikka (2023) applies the term ‘invisual’ to operational images of the cosmos and bios formed by machinic numerical sensing. Hyperspectral remote sensing devices, spectroscopic lenses, or electron microscopes for instance, transform numerical information or datasets into images. The invisual is not necessarily invisible; Parikka finds the  invisual image in physical phenomena which manifest in data visualisation, and in this case in artworks.¹⁷ Schuppli uncovers urgent eco-cultural meaning in denaturalised forms of imaging, in this case, the machine perception of thermal inversion via a thermal camera. She suggests: ‘Denaturalizing the image has become an important part of each project as a way of countering the sensibility of the nature documentary.’¹⁸ The hypervisual, scopic regime of the nature documentary centralises the human point of view, while invisual processes sense biophysical nature’s representation of ‘itself’ through numbers. The unusual temperature of the iceberg manifests, then is processed into numerical digits by a sensor, and eventually becomes the HD digital video perceptible to humans. This estranging of technical image-making in an artwork becomes an explicit form of witnessing climate heating. In the artwork I turn to next, the climate crisis is signalled implicitly in a materialised sky-image which I encountered in New Delhi.

Tainted Air

The common meaning of the tainted implies the contaminated and the suspect, however one word of Latinate origin tingere, tinged or dyed, conjures an image of colourful hues, where visual pleasure might spill into urgent politics. In New Delhi in 2024, I visited Sustaina, a group exhibition which focused on future materials and creative modalities in response to the climate crisis. Kaalchakra (2017–ongoing) is a textile installation that fuses craft and atmospheric chemistry, created by a complex process of extracting elements of particulate matter, causing air pollution, to make dye. In Kaalchakra’s delicate funnel-shape, every thread is a direct material registration of extracted matter that produces the dense shroud of smog around Delhi. Artist and designer Gaurav Jai Gupta and his Studio AKAARO colleagues soak hand-woven threads with the residue of this photochemical smog. Solutions of particulate compounds for the dye derive from carbon, sulphur and other volatile substances. Studio AKAARO focus on high fashion garment design and manufacture, while also experimenting with such artistic interventions to foreground the life-threatening levels of air pollution in their Delhi home.

To install Kaalchakra, swaths of dyed fabric threads are woven around a series of large concentric metal hoops that expand outward through the gallery space. The form and title of the installation references the revolving of the planets, human breathing and cyclical energies in the body. The Kaalchakra is a system in Hinduism, and Tibetan and Indian Vajravana Buddhism with customs and texts that meditate on time (kaala) and cycles or wheels (chakra).

Sustaina’s curators Thukral and Tagra argue for the inherent power of materials to ‘channel a sensorium of touch, smell, sound and vision as paths to climate awareness ^….’¹⁹ Delhi is tagged as one of the world’s most polluted cities, a condition driven by global industrial production, including textile mills, vehicle emissions and the burn-off from wheat stubble by farmers forced into multi-cropping in neighbouring regions. The haze of industry which developed after modernism dissolves the distance between sky and earth, ‘bringing the sky down to earth’, according to Steven Connor.²⁰ The dying of thread with airborne toxins is an act of radical materialism, connecting us via the sense of tactility, to the commonplace stuff of air and the right to breathe freely. These absorbent threads remind us that we depend on air, sunlight and cotton plants, that we are not autonomous, discrete bodies but rather vulnerable and susceptible. The translucent weave of golds, violets, greens, mustard and blue-greys of the sky becomes a poly-dimensional vessel for reflecting on the toll on life of the deepening climate crisis.

Tainted Timescales

Artists’ tainted images rally us to face environmental crisis via the senses, to relate to the image and the body as a sensor, and to reimagine the way we relate to more-than-human and human life. The crisis in existential crisis, according to media theorist Joseph Masco, is that if we tune in constantly to mass media rhetoric and spectacular imaging of fleeting events, we remain caught in a crisis-paralysis circuit. The label of ‘crisis’ has become a counterrevolutionary idiom, a means of stalling rather than inviting active responses to forms of violence across the military, the neo-capitalist economy, and the extractive orientation toward the environment.²¹ Artists offer a viable means of attuning to the longer patterns of environmental disaster by illuminating or disorienting our relation to our media-natural-cultural habitat with processes that invite us to notice the unseen. The intensive flux of a purple toxin, the white fragile broken bone, holds me in wonder, while at the same time I plunge into the specific ecological catastrophe embedded in the material image. Instead of an aggressive media space devoted to detailing crises in sound bites, the tainted image lingers with us. It holds longer timescales of the moon, breath, ocean currents and the cosmos, catalysing vital eco-critical conversations.

Amundsen’s images keep nuclear non-proliferation on the agenda by recalling historical events that have become obscured, a task never more vital after the eightieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and nine countries still have a stockpile of thousands of nuclear weapons. Radioactive traces in bodies, freshwater and in sea-water transmuted to images, assert the present threat of nuclear poisoning. Amos Gebhardt’s X-ray images and Kate van der Drift’s negatives explore the taint of colonisation on animal life and water biota, as we live through the age of the third mass extinction. Body to body, we sense past lives in their damaged, honoured bones, or fluid residues of microbial worlds. The heating climate is a symptom of violent military-industrial power that taints invisual, machinic perception of icebergs as revealed by Susan Schuppli. Our instruments augment human perception to timescales we cannot otherwise reach, with sometimes corrupted information. Studio AKAARO’s textile installation holds the toxic biogeochemistry of the atmosphere in a multitude of individual threads. The tainted is preposterous, after Bal: an echo of past events that are contrary to reason, or to the commonsense demand for planetary survival for the sake of human and more-than-human beings. The aberrant artwork operates on multiple registers to unsettle ossified Western thinking and destructive human behaviours.