Throughout history, people have imagined the end of the world in countless ways, often marked by awe, dread and morbid fascination.
The University of Chicago has an unusual claim on that imagination. It helped usher in the nuclear age, houses the Doomsday Clock—and, from 1925-39, sent archaeologists to excavate the prophesied site of Armageddon itself, at the ancient city of Megiddo.
“As objects were uncovered, studied and photographed, they also entered a parallel world of media and spectacle,” said Kiersten Neumann, curator at the University’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) Museum. “Our current exhibition marks the centennial of that campaign, revisiting not only what was unearthed, but also what was imagined.”
This collision of the real and constructed was at the center of ISAC’s Jan. 22 program “Translating the End of Times: Art, Science, and the Media of Apocalypse.” Neumann led a panel discussion featuring visual artists Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson with Prof. Daniel Holz, a UChicago physicist and chair of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which sets the hands of the Doomsday Clock to reflect the risk of global catastrophe. In the week following the program, the Bulletin advanced the clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been in its history.
The ISAC program was organized in conjunction with the museum’s current special exhibition Megiddo: A City Unearthed, A Past Imagined, curated by Neumann. The seemingly disparate group came together, she said, “to reflect more broadly on how art, science and the media translate complex ideas into images and stories that shape our collective imagination and discourse.”
The discussion centered on the role of media and history in shaping public understanding of risk. Together, a biblical battleground, a film that loops through dawn without ever reaching day, and a clock that measures the world’s risks in minutes to midnight became three ways of approaching the same question—how we imagine the end.
Promoting the story of Armageddon
The story of Megiddo as a real place is inseparable from its symbolic role in the Bible—the site of a prophesied final battle between good and evil in the Book of Revelation.
This was something UChicago archaeologists were keenly aware of as they excavated this historic site at a crossroads in the Jezreel Valley—located in what was then British Mandate Palestine and is now modern-day Israel—as featured in the ISAC museum’s current special exhibition.
Neumann explained that archival correspondence connected with the Megiddo Expedition shows field directors and ISAC leadership in Chicago discussing how to best promote their findings through a “carefully orchestrated media campaign.”
“One narrative stands out among others,” Neumann said. “Megiddo’s legacy as biblical Armageddon.”
Headlines from the time leaned into this angle, she noted, pointing to news hooks such as “spoils of the spade at Armageddon” and “new revelations from Armageddon.”
In the decades that followed, the concept of Armageddon developed in the public imagination, eventually splitting completely from the historical location. That imagined apocalypse took on a new immediacy after World War II, when the development of atomic weapons reframed the end of the world as a closer human-made possibility rather than a distant prophecy.
Both the Bulletin and its Doomsday Clock emerged from that realization. Created in 1947 by Manhattan Project scientists at UChicago, the clock reflected a new scale of human-made risk.
“They were freaked out,” Holz said of the clock’s creators. “For the first time humans really directly had a tool for Armageddon.”
With that level of immediacy, this broader understanding of apocalypse almost entirely displaced the more specific place-based one. Rawlinson said he and Crowe were fascinated to learn that Armageddon referred to something tangible, rather than a media abstraction.
“This thing that you’ve grown up with as a metaphor for a thing that’s going to happen is actually a physical location on the planet,” he said.
That “crosswiring,” he added, kept returning to them until it became their 2017 film, the experimental Song for Armageddon, currently on view in ISAC's Megiddo exhibition on loan from the artists.
Structured around a Doomsday Clock-style "minutes to midnight" elasticity and shot on-site at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Tel Megiddo, the film loops through sequences following a team of workers setting up and wiping down thousands of chairs, preparing for an audience that never arrives.
“Of course it needs to be a loop,” Rawlinson said. “That sense of being caught before the moment of the end—is this it? Is this it now?”
Living at 85 seconds to midnight
In addition to his other work, Holz is also the founding director of the UChicago Existential Risk Laboratory. He described his own initial understanding of Armageddon as abstract—“this term for the end of everything”—until he began thinking through the practical mechanisms of global catastrophe.
“When you really think about the end of the world,” he said, “it’s most likely to be due to humans.”
Though it started to measure the risk of nuclear war, the Doomsday Clock today incorporates threats such as climate change, pandemics, disinformation and emerging risks from new technologies, including AI. Holz acknowledged the limits of assessing all these threats but said that setting the clock’s hands “captures people’s attention and starts that conversation.”
“The most important aspect of that number is how is it changing—is the clock turning forward or back?” he said.
Crowe and Rawlinson saw a similar ethic in their own work.
“We see our responsibility as artists as keeping our antennas up, tuning into the airwaves as it were,” said Rawlinson. “Our job was to stay alert, to tune in to what’s going on in the world and to reflect it, amplify it and focus it in some way.”
They pointed out that most apocalypse stories rush straight to destruction, skipping the moment when people still have choices. Like the Doomsday Clock, Song for Armageddon stays in the uneasy space of waiting before disaster strikes.
By lingering in that moment, these projects make room for the possibility that tomorrow still exists—and that what we do today can make a difference.
“The whole point of this exercise is to turn it back,” Holz said of the Doomsday Clock. “It’s this idea of hope.”
Megiddo: A City Unearthed, A Past Imagined is a free exhibition at the University's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum, on view through March 15.
A recording of the program "Translating the End of Times: Art, Science, and the Media of Apocalypse" is available to stream on ISAC's YouTube channel.
