Hippie Atom Test
Paul Hertz
“Hippie Atom Test is an animation that plays on themes of broken cultural memory presented in my Glitch Nation series of still images. Taking its images from government and news media archives, history textbooks, and vacation snapshots, Glitch Nation uses glitch as a metaphor for the processes by which we record, forget, mythologize, discard, recast, contradict and reconstruct our collective experiences in order to make some kind of sense of the world. Most of the images are involved with my own experiences coming of age in the United States. I was a grade school student during the 50s, drilled in hiding in the school basement in case of nuclear attack. Hippie Atom Test is an attempt to come to terms with the terrors that were taught to me as safety procedures—utterly absurd and horrific in their implications, and almost certainly useless—by otherwise reasonable people.” -PS