Vivian Charlesworth

Active from 1946-2006, Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) in Simi Valley, CA is a former research facility that was used to develop and test nuclear reactors, liquid rocket engines and the SNAP-10A, a nuclear reactor launched into space. Early scientists and engineers at the site were called the “nuclear cowboys” as they took on a frontier/outlaw ethos while they experimented with extremely risky technologies in remote terrain. This wild west approach to experimentation resulted in a secret sodium reactor meltdown in 1959, which has since been declassified.

At the same time as the nuclear cowboys were pushing the frontier of technology in Simi Valley, 30 miles southeast in Los Angeles, scenic artists were creating backdrops for films. These artists helped define modern cinema, as they conjured desert vistas or alien geographies based on the California landscape.

In 2014, I, along with another artist, Alyson Ogasian, received a grant to visit SSFL. And since that visit, much of the ruins of SSFL have been removed, specifically the rocket test stands that were used to test the liquid rocket engines for the Apollo missions. I was lucky enough to have visited these sites, and to have taken photographs of these monuments now lost to the past.

Hollywood’s painted backdrops are now a thing of the past as well, having been replaced with CGI, LED screens, and likely soon AI.

For this project I trained an AI model on scenic paintings created by backdrop artists in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. I then used this model to transform photographs of SSFL into Hollywood backdrops. Through this project, my goal was to merge two vanishing landscapes. The resulting images reimagine invisible architectures, creating a hallucination of California’s dual mythologies — the dream factory and the frontier.