Three days after the explosion and meltdown of Chernobyl’s Nuclear Reactor Unit 4 on April 26th 1986, filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko was granted permission to fly over the 30-square km site known as the “red zone” in order to document the extraordinary efforts at cleanup by Ukrainian workers and volunteers. When Shevchenko’s 35-mm film footage was later developed, he noticed that the film was heavily pockmarked and carried extraneous static interference and noise. Thinking initially that the film stock used had been defective, Shevchenko finally realised that what he had captured on film was the image and sound of radioactivity itself. An act of deformation whereby the radical imprint of the disaster was inscribed directly into the emulsion of the film as decaying particles moved through the camera.