The Shadow Peace is an unusual short by Neil Halloran, in which he turns gigabytes of boring statistics into vivid and ominous footage, telling about the terrible future of humanity, plunged into a nuclear war on a global scale.
Artist Neil Halloran is a master at transforming huge sets of obscure statistics into capacious and spectacular videos. In his latest project, he illustrated an ominous statistic: the total number of deaths caused by the total use of nuclear weapons.
The Shadow Peace is crumbling, inverted population growth pyramids that show, better than any numbers, how the “nuclear plague” takes more and more lives over time. Predicting the consequences of a world nuclear war may seem absurd, but Neil is a master of his craft, and his paintings are just a reflection of the bitter reality.
The video begins with a short demography lesson: the director explains how many people were born and died on Earth in the entire history of mankind, as well as how many people live on the planet now. The Third World War, according to Halloran, will be an extrapolation of the consequences of the destruction caused by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki back in 1945, by increasing the number and destructive power of warheads. The author examines the concept of mass nuclear exchange – a situation when a single launched warhead will cause panic in the world community and provoke a chain reaction, when all countries randomly bombard each other with nuclear missiles. At the end of the video, Neil raises a number of practical issues: the ban on the proliferation of nuclear warheads, general disarmament, and the effectiveness of existing peacekeeping initiatives.
