The Atomic Gardener, Sarah Angliss (Wuthering Bytes 2019)

Far away from the cares of Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, Muriel Howorth, composer, self-taught physicist, sci-fi author and atomic evangelist set out ‘to lead women out of the kitchen and into the atomic age”. In 1948 she set up an audacious venture: ‘The Atomic Gardening Society’. Co-ordinated through the Post Office, the society grew atom-blasted seeds in gardens and allotments around the UK. Their aim was to find the ‘golden mutant’: a mutant vegetable that would grow so large, it would cure world hunger. Sarah Angliss tells the story of Howorth, a remarkable, British technoutopian whose ideas and methods were surprisingly ahead of their time.

Sarah Angliss is a composer, performer and maker of robotic musical instruments. Her music often draws on resonances between European folklore and early notions of machines. She’s been seen and heard at The National Theatre, The Old Vic and Almeida, London, Park Avenue Armory and National Sawdust, New York, BFI Southbank and many live music festivals. In 2019 she received a Composer’s Award from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Between commissions and live performances, Sarah researches technology and culture. Her research has been published by the Science Museum, Smithsonian Scholarly Press and The Wire Magazine. She’s made documentaries on sound culture for BBC Radio 4 (‘The Bird Fancyer’s Delight’, 2011 and ‘Echo in a Bottle’, 2018). In August 2016 she was invited to write an extensive introduction to the long awaited reprint of ‘An Individual Note - of Sound, Music and Electronics’, written by BBC Radiophonic Workshop founder Daphne Oram.

[whowereweagain]

I wish there were footage or a reenactment of Isotopia... In The Form of a Mine, I discovered her nuclear enthusiasm sleuthing around for info about atomic history in relationship to life science and eugenics, thought it was the perfect thing.
Tech optimists have always been insane but the ideology keeps getting more insidious as the technology keeps getting deadlier while converging on a truly dystopian cybernetic future. In this way tech optimism is a very repressive ideology used by the authorities to constrain our imagination and trick us into consenting to the futuristic agenda for frontier science and technology without sharing all the sordid details.
We shouldn't let high tech tools for violence extraction and control be leveraged to take our destiny away from us.