Artificial Sun

Artificial Sun examines the escalating threat of the rapid incorporation of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies into nuclear weapons systems and civilian nuclear power facilities. Set against growing silence on the devastating human and environmental impacts of nuclear bombs, contamination and catastrophes, the work explores how the speed of unconstrained technological development, miniaturisation, cyberwarfare, geopolitical violence, and fantasies of space expansionism are not only posing existential planetary risks at a scale that challenges the scope of human imagination but are also changing the very fabric of the society and world that we are living in.

Credits

Camera/editing/writing: Shona Illingworth
Sound composition: Aki Pasoulas
Sound recordist: Sonny Sealy
Sound engineer for voice: Jeff Knowler
Consulting Producer, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Luli van der Does

Shona Illingworth

Shona Illingworth is a Danish-Scottish artist based in London, UK. Trained by her long-term investigations into the dynamic processes of memory, amnesia and cultural erasure, her work examines the devastating impact of the accelerating military, industrial and environmental transformations of airspace and outer space, and the implications for human rights. She co-founded the Airspace Tribunal in 2018 with human rights lawyer Nick Grief. She now co-directs the Airspace Tribunal with philosopher, writer and sociologist Renata Salecl.

Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Topologies of Air, at Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2025),  and Les Abattoirs, held at the Musée – Frac Occitanie, Toulouse (2022-23), the Bahrain National Museum, Manama (2022), and The Power Plant, Toronto (2022). Illingworth was a recipient of the Stanley Picker Fellowship and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2016). She is a professor of Art, Film and Media at the University of Kent and currently an Imperial War Museum Associate, Artist Fellow, for the UKRI Polarities Network and sits on the international editorial boards of Digital War and Memory, Mind and Media. A substantial monograph on her work, Topologies of Air (Shona Illingworth; Anthony Downey [Ed.]) was published by Sternberg Press and The Power Plant in 2022.