When I first came across Douglas Coupland’s debut novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, first published in 1991, it spoke to me as surely as if its author was writing directly into my mind’s eye. The book’s cast of disenfranchised twentysomethings – suspicious of and jaded by the culture into which they have been birthed – have dropped out of the rat-race to form new, less complicated (certainly less than idealised) existences. In these new lives, they occupy low-paid, low-responsibility McJobs, waiting out the future, or lack thereof. Now iconic, Generation X had an immediate, deeply felt impact on all – specifically those born between 1965 and 85 – for whom it was written. It articulated and defined all too well the characteristics and preoccupations of an entire generation. These include listlessness and ennui, resulting in an unhappy concoction of mostly feigned nihilism with sporadic states of high alert. In doing so, it couldn’t help but capture and become part of the zeitgeist.

Alongside its central narrative, Coupland littered his era-defining debut with definitions, factoids, text artworks and observations – what amount today, to a lexicon for, and means to grapple with, the times.

Mental Ground Zero: The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb; frequently a shopping mall.

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Many of the concerns, contradictions and anxieties Coupland addressed in his book are found in the work of artist Kirsty Harris; in-particular the threat – both real and implied, physical and psychological – posed by the ‘bomb’. A Gen Xer herself (born in 1978, Harris is on the younger end of the scale), she has stated that her work addresses “The decisive moment, a meditation on a split second. That split second iconically representing our race to self destruction. The beauty and awe of the landscape, the dust, the glow, the force of the explosion. The myths surrounding characters in this masterplan to kill ourselves off. The fight for survival. We’ve shown ourselves THE END.”

Included in the exhibition Two Plus Two Makes Four, the 1950s rotary-style wall-mounted telephone looks innocuous; kitsch, even (the kind of kitsch we Gen Xers, sometimes unfathomably, love to love and disparage in equal measure). But at the first of its intermittent rings, your anxiety spikes. Is it a herald of THE END? Or, simply: IT IS THE END. You steel yourself. Instinctively take a breath. Finally, warily, you pick up the receiver. There is no voice as such on the other end of the line; neither, thankfully, is there a pre-recorded official message of any kind. Instead, a composition plays, beginning (I think) with the picking of double bass strings. The arrangement continues, and the double-bass is joined by piano, drums, saxophone, guitar, harmonica, shaker and triangle. Together, they make for a compelling modernist-sounding piece of music. Its effect is eerie, sparse, occasionally jarring. If you were to sit in the audience as an orchestra played this piece, you’d likely find it powerful and captivating, although you’d perhaps be uncertain as to why.

This is Cold Call (How I Learned to Stop Worrying (1945-2019), an interactive installation which, as with all of Harris’ work, is based on the imagery and data collected on the atom bomb. Here, the notes played on the various instruments represent – in fact, are – musical translations of nuclear detonations made by different participating countries since 1945. (The first atomic bomb, named “Little Boy”, was dropped on Hiroshima from the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, at 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945. Each instrument represents a country – the double bass is the USA; the piano the Soviet Union; the drums France, and so on and so forth. In total, its five or so minutes encapsulates more than 2,000 explosions. Each note depicts a single bomb, there are lulls and short silences before the quiet is filled by the crash of keys or the warning of the sax. The calm before the coming, maybe decisive, storm.