T1/2 is a sound installation made from field recordings of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in eastern Kazakhstan. Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted over 450 nuclear tests at this site. The land carries that history in its soil and water, in its air and in the remains of Soviet-era architecture.
In December 2024, Kamila Narysheva recorded the site using hydrophones, geophones, and contact microphones. She captured sounds from earth, water, architectural remnants, and open air, all below the usual threshold of hearing. Together with Vicky Clarke, she developed an algorithmic patch in MaxMSP and a Max for Live device that deconstructs the recorded material. The patch synchronizes the decay of each sound with the half-lives of radionuclides present in the area. Exponential attenuation dictates the rhythm at which sound disappears, measured in millisecond intervals.
The installation has no visual component apart from a blue light referencing Cherenkov radiation. Visitors encounter the work through listening alone. Sound was chosen for its physical relationship to the body: it passes through matter, produces reverberation, and activates sensory memory.
The Semipalatinsk Test Site exists in a state of ongoing half-life. Radioactive isotopes continue to decay. The land is also recovering. The recorded sounds hold traces of what happened at the site and evidence of ecological return. In this work, decay is also transformation: the dissolution of matter giving way to regeneration.
The nuclear trace at Semipalatinsk remains present and active, though invisible. T1/2 makes it audible. The work offers a decolonial perspective, one that recognizes the capacity of the landscape to heal itself.
Kamila Narysheva on the Project
For a long time, the Polygon existed for me, as it does for many Kazakhs, as a distant place: a concept from school lessons and documentary films. A space of undeniable suffering, a "black mark" in history. Trying to make sense of it, I thought of it as a kind of heterotopia, a place where the past coexists with the present without dissolving into it. Once I arrived there, that thought began to shift.
I came to the Polygon expecting to feel fear, the weight of memory, the trace of trauma. In the first days, I was met with silence. The steppe was nearly motionless. The air held no wind, no signs. Only horses grazing among the dry feather grass, the occasional goat crossing the road, hare tracks etched into the ice. The established narrative of the "contaminated land" did not hold. Instead of catastrophe, I encountered a heavy uncertainty. A complex temporality, where past and future fold into each other and produce the present.
Together with Vicky Clarke, I began working on T1/2, a sound installation based on field recordings I made in December 2024 using geophones, hydrophones, and contact microphones. I recorded the earth, water, air, and remnants of architecture, things usually beyond the threshold of hearing. We then developed a MaxMSP patch where the sound decays in synchronization with the half-lives of radionuclides present in the Polygon’s soil.
This project was a form of presence. Through sound, we tried to approach memory without turning it into a monument. Timothy Morton uses the term hyperobject for phenomena that exceed human scale, that reach beyond any single generation or narrative. The nuclear legacy of the Polygon is one. And yet hyperobjects can be bodily. They are felt in the resistance of the ground, the movement of water, the breath of animals, the static air, the vulnerability of one’s own body.
The sound in T1/2 does not explain or comment. It lingers, then disappears. I came to see through this process that the space holds trauma and endurance at once. The places where we recorded were not empty. The stories we encountered were not broken. Life continues there, within complex time.
Vicky Clarke on the Project
My artistic practice explores the materiality of sound. I have always been drawn to working with recordings on an atomic level, through musique concrète, machine learning, and electronics. This project gave me the chance to think about how sound technologies let us move past habitual perception, uncover hidden sonic structures, and hear stories scattered across time and space.
We began with field recordings. We prepared a wide range of microphones and recording techniques because we did not know what sounds we would be able to capture or which locations we would have access to. Flexibility was essential. In the mixing process, we aimed to preserve the character of the place. We developed a Max MSP patch that deconstructed sound materials according to the principle of radionuclide half-life decay at the Polygon. Exponential attenuation dictated the rhythm of sound disappearance in millisecond intervals.
Sound connects people to historical events. It adds emotional texture to what might otherwise remain abstract. The history of nuclear contamination requires empathy and understanding alongside archaeological or sociocultural interpretation. This project gave me the opportunity to learn about Kazakhstan, its history, and its landscapes, and to see how much this subject matters beyond any single national context. It was an honour to collaborate with Kamila on this research.