REACTOR
Commissioned by Signal Film and Media, Barrow-in-Furness, UK. Generously supported by Arts Council England
Reactor is a multimedia installation exploring the possibilities of the autonomous submarine. Set against the backdrop of Barrow’s defence industry, Reactor imagines a speculative world in which the submarine becomes aware of its own autonomy, reflecting on whether it might follow or refuse its orders. As autonomous submarines designed for underwater warfare begin to enter the global market, this project is particularly pertinent.
Following Variations, a recent UK touring exhibition which interrogated the problematic infrastructures of artificial intelligence, Reactor focuses on how this technology is being applied in a military context. In the installation, a constructed control room becomes the stage on which the autonomous submarine’s inner dialogue unfolds. Drawing upon archival images of command decks and the more contemporary technological spaces of system control, the installation draws attention to the power struggles between governments, profit-driven technology companies, and those that train or operate these systems.
The voice of the submarine has been developed through conversations with people connected to the shipyard in Barrow, enabling the future submarine to come into dialogue with echoes of the workers that came before. This inner monologue reflects on agency and what it really means to be ‘fully’ autonomous. As the narrative unfolds, the submarine becomes a site of hesitation, no longer sure if it is a vessel, a worker or a weapon. Much like Hammond’s previous exhibition at Signal in 2017, this new installation connects history and locality to its potential future, connecting the industrial landscape of Barrow to its global context.
Credits
Animation developed with Model Room
Design Director & Lead Animator for Model Room: James B Stringer
Producer & Animator: Ben Evans James
Additional Environment Art: Clifford Sage
Theatre Factory Actors: Dan Hardie, Greg O'Flynn, George Melvin, Nicole Rose, Phill Gregg
Voiceover artist: Rachel Ashton
Performance documentation: Laurence Campbell
With thanks to: Erin Pennington, Jennifer McMillan, John Harrison, Rebecca McIlgorm, Alex Taylor
Excerpt from Corridor8, article written by Caroline Bagenal - June 2026:
The film’s visual world, encompassing surging black waters and vivid skies, was created using Unreal Engine, a computer graphics game software commonly used to build immersive digital environments for games, film and animation. The images are a simulation of a simulation, a collage of images creating a vivid glowing seascape. Though the dominating imagery is of waves there is a recurring composite collage of luminous buildings on the shore which captures aspects of the Barrow Shipyards but also refers to the global defence industry more broadly. Glitches repeatedly fracture the images, seas and buildings collapse into interference bands suggesting system failure. Underwater scenes show circular forms which resemble mines. Hammond tells me that while she was making this work a school in Iran was hit by a US targeting system apparently operating on outdated information, killing at least 175 children. On the screen a ghostly image of a whale is seen briefly then disappears into a glowing orange ocean. I hear the whale songs in the soundscape and see a whale’s eye in the center of the floor sculpture. Whales haunt this installation. Perhaps the submarine is speaking to whales when it says, ‘I mis-interpret your body as you mirror my own. A threat. A target.……I mis-judge….I, I didn’t realise’. Misreading of data is a theme of the show. A simplified rendering of a whale as a three-dimensional mesh model is an important image for this exhibition and is being used on the handout. The digital mesh model of a whale resembles a submarine. Both whales and submarines have streamlined bodies to glide silently through the water and use echolocation to navigate, and tragically whales have been targeted because their shadows and surfacing patterns have been mistaken for submarines.