'As soon as you call someone the enemy, you make it a noun - fixed, non-negotiable.' - I Saw the World End at the Imperial War Museum

By Bowie Sharp

'I Saw the World End' at Picadilly Circus. Image courtesy of Es Devlin.

As dusk fell on August 6th, 2025 - exactly 80 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima -  I Saw the World End, a haunting digital diptych by Es Devlin and Machiko Weston, appeared on Europe’s largest LED screen at Piccadilly Circus. Earlier that day, exclusive screenings of the work had been playing on loop inside the Imperial War Museum, where its accumulation of images, testimonies, and sound built a space of reflection before its public unveiling in one of London’s busiest squares. The piece was originally intended for a 2020 display, but the project was delayed, making its eventual presentation feel even more resonant.  

Composed of archival footage, eyewitness accounts, poetry, and newly commissioned animation, this piece confronts viewers with the terrifying scale of human destruction and unfathomable loss. Yet the form in which this loss is conveyed is unusual, and quietly radical. I Saw the World End is not a film in the conventional sense. There are no actors, no narrative arc, and imagery of mushroom clouds and devastated cities is few and far between. Instead, it does something totally different - it asks the audience to read together. The screen fills with flickering white text set against black, a guided journey through memory, and political amnesia.  

In a post screening Q&A, Devlin traced the idea back to a personal realisation. “The idea came about because I noticed I was reading less. That process of translating from text to image in your mind - it’s so precious. But I was doing it less because of distractions, gadgets, everything.” 

She found herself reconnecting with that act of translation in the most unexpected of places. “The longest stretch of reading I was doing was actually reading the subtitles at the opera! I sometimes work in opera, and I realised: what if there were no opera, just the subtitles - what if we just read together?” 

That thought became a method. “So we created something we called a ‘collective reading.’ The first one was a 24-minute abridged version of Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, with 2,000 people gathered, reading together. It was incredibly powerful. You’re alone in your mind, but also together in a shared experience. That’s where the action happens - in each person’s reading.” 

This idea, that that even the most private forms of reflection can be collective, shapes I Saw the World End at every level. It is a work about unspeakable personal trauma, but avoids spectacle. It focuses instead on attention, language, and collective memory, and calls its viewers not only to witness, but to read and to remember. 

To approach a subject of such immense historical weight, a careful balance of emotional intelligence and deep understanding is essential, and both artists began with gaps in their knowledge. “Neither of us had deeply researched this subject before,” said Devlin. “We spent, I’d say, the first month of the project diving into every avenue we could - literally starting from a central point and letting each lead take us organically to the next.” 

For Weston, this research involved a personal reckoning. “I kind of had to start from scratch with the research. I did find so many voices, testimonies, interviews - but those survivors are now very old, and their voices are fading.” 

Voice, and its persistence across generations, became a central aspect of the work. “We are exploring this moment at a range of scales simultaneously,” the artists wrote, “from one millionth of a second to ten seconds, by which time the majority of the physical destruction was complete; as well as the timeline of the mythological impact: from our grandparents, to our parents, to our own perception of this moment.” 

Duality is central to the work’s form. The unique configuration of the Picadilly Lights screen became a limitation that shaped the final composition. “We learned English Heritage has a very specific requirement for that screen: you’re not allowed to show one single full-frame image - it has to be divided into five sections,” Devlin noted. “We tried to get around that by dividing it down the middle with black panels at the sides. And then that dividing line became the centre of the work. Interestingly, the visuals of this piece emerged from within Devlin’s own team - “The animators were actually artists and architects in my studio, not trained in animation.”  

A recurring motif throughout the work is the danger of fixed definitions - particularly the word enemy. “All week I’ve been noticing how frequently we hear the word enemy,” said Devlin. “Just like [Harry] Truman, who once described the nuclear bomb as a great triumph of modern science - he constantly used the word enemy. But as soon as you call someone the enemy, you make it a noun - fixed, non-negotiable.” 

The project builds not only from historical texts, but also from the raw emotional weight of survivor testimony. The voiceovers are unflinching: 

“I saw a young mother running with a headless baby on her back. I saw someone else with his belly ripped open and intestines spilling out.” 

“Still, to this day, my sister’s voices haunt me. I’ll feel guilty as long as I live. I will never be happy.” 

“Blood was pouring out of my flesh. I know it sounds strange, but I felt absolutely no pain. I even forgot to cry.” 

Weston described the impact of this research as not just informative, but transformative. “We wanted to bring together different perspectives, not just a single narrative,” she said. “Multiple voices, multiple angles, to help people today see things anew.” 

From this chorus of voices and testimonies, thought-provoking dualities emerge: the past and the present, the local and the planetary. As one voice in the work puts it, “I call them apocalyptic twins because these two threats, climate change and nuclear arms, can destroy the human species.” 

While the threat of nuclear annihilation has receded in public consciousness since the Cold War, I Saw the World End insists on its urgency. As Devlin put it in closing: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.”. Eighty years on, as the spectre of nuclear threat resurfaces and our memory of it is fragile, this work feels not just timely, but essential. In a world that encourages us to scroll past and move on, I Saw the World End holds us in place, and demands that we stand still for a moment, read, and remember together. 

'I Saw the World End' is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq5bhKJjc70&t=181s