GAMMA Is Here

Architizer News

GAMMA Is Here

February 29, 2012

Factory Fifteen‘s short film “Gamma” reimagines the ruins of the Chernobyl exclusion zone as one of many sites ravaged by radiation in a post-nuclear future. The footage, which the collective shot on location in Chernobyl and Baikonur while accompanying the Architectural Association’s Unknown Fields Division last summer, is mixed with several large-scale CGI-elements including floating megastructures and the “Nuke-root” organisms which latch onto the ground and buildings in a massive campaign to purge the land of radioactive matter.

The film centers around a survivor’s recollections of the destruction of his city Pripyat which had been marked for salvation. Gamma, a large private enterprise, launched the expedition after years of nuclear war, using their patented Nuke-roots to suck up radioactivity as part of a grand benevolent plan to rehabilitate organic life on earth. Unfortunately, like nearly all private-backed social ventures, Gamma’s efforts quickly proved feckless; the organisms soon assume autonomy and lay waste to the cities they had been sent to recover. In Pripyat, the roots spread at a viral rate, consuming the landscape and rendering it “more radioactive, broken and uninhabitable than before,” as giant Gamma war machines loom above in surveillance. The film follows team of researchers–AA students in disguise–shown navigating through the rubble, observing the monumental devastation wrought by Gamma’s “almighty cock-up.”