Phenomenological Process in Radioactive

Hello folks! 

So I'm actually quite upset that I missed the last discussion of Radioactive and I really wanted to bring up something about Phenomenology (visual media theory) and apply it to some of the really expressionistic, color-dominant compositions of the text. I'm no expert-- I just remember this concept from a DAAP course on Visual Media theory circa 2014. 
In short, it's a way to talk about very subjective experiences like "affect" and "feeling" and a "sense of" in a sort of critical, theory-based approach.
It's especially interesting to read some of the images in Radioactive from this perspective when we think about Redniss' emphasis on the process of creation, and how she stacked sketches and compositions from all different moments (even with loaded meaning from her own experiences-- remember that jazz performance from her lecture?)  to combine them in an evocative sense. 

"In simple terms, Nancy helps us move from a phenomenology that is a description of the senses (I saw this, I heard this, I felt this) to one that is a Phenomenology of affect. Affect is a term that refers to the more liminal and less clearly defined qualities of experience. Affect is frequently reduced to emotion, and this is a good starting point, but affect can refer to the domain of impressions, intuition, memories, imagination or even the feeling that hangs in a room. In theatre and performance we work on an affective level all the time: affect is what is conveyed in between the words or gestures. It is the unspoken. Sometimes it falls between the senses too, or goes beyond them. Affect is also a sort of exchange of forces between people, or between people and objects, the outer world or structures. It has been called a shimmer or a ripple. Phenomenologies of affect can include set design, costumes, music, lighting, etc. What we in performance use to create the ‘feel or mood’ of a piece." (From this lecture of Swedish scholar Kozel.)

Basically, Redniss draws upon this Phenomenology of Affect in the creation of her pages. Just how she said every component of this book carries meaning, even her process does as well, for it harnesses forces of the "unseen" (mood, affect, a "sense of") and conveys it.  

And as a text that feels mildly encyclopedic, it adds a layer of nuance, talking back to thinking of history or biography as a series of facts, this phenomenological process speaks to how we can (responsibly) talk about real people (e.g. their body) that we can never really know. 

Perhaps reading the text with this active, heavy authorship we can make sense of why pages follow one another. Redniss actually visited and interviewed subjects of Hiroshima, for example, and the transcript is distinctly marked by her affective response to this, in conjunction with her project. 

In final quote of the biography I think we have something that speaks a lot to this sense of knowing via sensation. These subjectively coded things like memory and associated feeling and image are coded into the brain, and in that sense, that person "lives" via these sensations. (This is on page 180)
Parallel this to her process: colors, lines, expressionistic drawing coded by her lived experience and collected onto a page to convey meaning-- this person embodied via subjective sensation. 
The final image of the book is a curious choice-- it's this very orange composition, right? Oozing sexuality. Warm tones-- a sense of a warm glowing, as opposed to the stark X-ray blue type compositions. 
So we have this contrast between the phenomenological experience of knowing a person (page 180) vs. scientific expressions of our materiality void of sensation (see pages like 186) and she chose to end her examination of Curie with this image.
(side note: think of this with the death scene, and how she talked about how she struggled to understand and convey it, after reading the emotional accounts of the family and witnesses)



Anyway! Best weekend to everyone. 
AC