ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses upon Benjamin's reflections upon nature and technology, particularly film and photography, in the light of the blinding flash of the nuclear bomb. It also connects the idea of natural history to the concept of dark matter and the hyperobject. Radiation eradicates the distinction between media and material. Benjamin explains how the dissolution of the aura results in the total identification of the subject with the technical apparatus of film. The relation between the image and the object has also been obliterated in the irradiated footage shot at Chernobyl and in the contact prints of plants and flowers from the Exclusion Zone. In Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch exposes the destructive energy of the Trinity Test at the subatomic level of the optical unconscious.
