Harvestworks Digital Arts Center presents a selection of Peter d’Agostino’s video projects to coincide with the 80th Anniversary of the Nuclear Age. D’Agostino was born in July 1945, ‘between the bombs’ : A-bomb test in the U.S. July 16; and the bombings of Hiroshima, August 6, Nagasaki, August 9. Over the decades, his videos have been created at significant historic sites, including Hiroshima’s Peace Ceremonies.
STREAM HERE for the virtual program starting at 7 pm Aug 4 and continuing to Aug 10, 2025.
THE PROGRAM features excerpts from A-bomb @ 80, TRACES, VR-RV, Doomsday March.
A-bomb @ 80 (2025) Tracing origins of the A-bomb: places and people playing key roles in its conception and development. Los Alamos, New Mexico: Oppenheimer; Columbia University, New York: Fermi, Szilard; Berkeley, California: Oppenheimer, Teller; Princeton, New Jersey: Einstein, Oppenheimer.
TRACES (1995/2020) Moving between past and present, TRACES juxtaposes personal histories and cultural memories of the Atomic Age. Images and sounds filmed in Hiroshima during the annual Peace Memorial Ceremonies in remembrance of the bombing of the city on August 6, 1945 are combined with other related scenes, including a clip of J. Robert Oppenheimer expressing his regret at the moment of the first A-bomb test three weeks earlier on July 16.
TRACES: virtual installation (2020) This 3D model is a composite of the TRACES installation, exhibited in 1995 during the 50th anniversary of the Atomic Age, at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive; Goucher College Art Gallery, Baltimore; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC.
VR/RV: a Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality (1993/2020) On a drive in a recreational vehicle (RV) through a virtual reality (VR) theme park, VR/RV explores the displacement and disembodiment of a technologically determined culture which co-mingles video games and computerized war. Floating within this immersive computer generated electronic superhighway, video billboards serve as staging areas for utopian visions and dystopian nightmares, focusing on the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Doomsday March (2003-2025) A peace march protesting nuclear proliferation in Australia, 2003 is juxtaposed with scenes from the 1959 film, On the Beach. (The film portrays a post-World War III scenario in which Australians, on this remote continent, are the last of humankind, awaiting the fatal effects of radiation that has engulfed the rest of the world.) Now in 2025, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds to midnight – closest ever to human extinction. The factors include nuclear risks along with the climate crisis, wars, diseases, and disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence (AI).
Peter d’Agostino’s pioneering video, photography, and new media projects have been exhibited internationally for over five decades. His work was in the biennial exhibitions of Sao Paulo, Brazil; Gwangju, South Korea; Whitney Museum of American Art; collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive; Oakland Museum of California; National Gallery of Canada; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi, Belgium; LaCaixaForum, Barcelona, among others. D’Agostino’s fellowships and grants include: National Endowment for the Arts, Pew Trusts, Japan Foundation, Onassis Foundation, Leonardo Art & Climate Change and Fulbright awards to Australia, Brazil and Italy. He was an artist-in-residence at the TV Laboratory at WNET, New York; Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Italy; Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada; a visiting artist fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT: American Academy in Rome, National Center for SuperComputing Applications, University of Illinois, and ArtSci Center, UCLA. Surveys of his World-Wide-Walks projects have been exhibited at: University of Paris I Pantheon Art Gallery; Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; Bizkaia Aretoa, UPV/EHU Art Gallery, Bilbao, Spain.
Video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Visit the websites [ peterdagostino.com ] [ eai.org/artists/peter-d-agostino/titles ]