While nuclear energy is typically regarded as a 20th-century innovation, natural nuclear reactors created by the spontaneous splitting of uranium are almost two billion years old.

The music formation and art group Sárgany – which borrowed its name from the archaic Hungarian word for uranium – created its latest work specifically for this exhibition with its central element being a speculative object made of uranium glass: a tuning fork used for a fictitious initiation ritual to expose the participants to concentrated radiation*. The glass object is put in motion by the knocking sound of solenoid motors controlled by a uranium-ore-driven eurorack module. Using a Geiger–Müller counter, this module measures the intensity of radiation released by the decomposition of uranium ore and transforms the measurements into random signals. The thus generated vibrations of the glass object are picked up by a microphone and transferred into a sound-box, made using a resonator inside the vitrine. The uranium-oxide in the uranium glass lends the object a strong fluorescence under UV light. Radioactivity, which is unperceived by our senses, is represented sonically by the sound vibrations and visually by the fluorescence.

*The level of radiation in the uranium glass and the eurorack module is minute, thus posing no threat to the health of visitors.

Borbála Szalai