Salty Bomb
Video, 2026
In 1958, writer Frederick Winsor explored the unsettling possibilities of nuclear weapons in his children's book The Space Child’s Mother Goose:
The hydrogen dog and the cobalt cat
side by side in the armory sat.
Nobody thought about fusion or fission,
Everyone spoke of their peacetime mission.
Till somebody came and opened the door.
There they were, in a neutron fog,
The Codrogen cat and the hybalt dog;
They mushroomed up with a terrible roar–
And Nobody Never was there — Nomore.
Cobalt carries a troubling dual history: associated with nuclear destruction, yet also enabling medical advances. Cobalt-60 became an important source of radiation for cancer treatment, including treatment received by physicist Leo Szilard, whose work helped shape nuclear technology.
In Salty Bomb, a generative AI voice reflects on this history, extending its contradictions into contemporary computational systems. The apparently immaterial conversation depends on extensive networks of mineral extraction, human labour, energy consumption, and computation.
Drawing on Karen Hao's Empire of AI, the work considers how technological progress can obscure the extractive infrastructures that sustain it. Questions of authorship become questions of infrastructure.
References
Winsor, Frederick. The Space Child’s Mother Goose. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958. Internet Archive edition.
Appleton, T. R. “27. Cobalt: Mischief Managed.” The Episodic Table of Elements, December 17, 2018. Read article.
Hao, Karen. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. New York: Penguin Press, 2025.
Purchase:
Salty Bomb (Large) is available through the Alberta Craft Council.