Class proposal
“This Place is a Message...” 1
Through writing prompts, group critique and projects in the surrounding area, this class aims to deconstruct what we think of as our place and its materials, why we are drawn to them, what they say, and where they come from. We will respond to themes drawn from the Ethics of Color lectures, and think about the politics and ethics of material choices, how we regard stuff as available for our use. The goal of the class is to gain a greater understanding of the material-ontological which lives inside our work and ourselves, and think about how materiality situates us in the world. How can it be that a place is a message? We will investigate how materials become carriers of meaning, knowledge, and deep time, and reflect on how those materials speak to inheritances of colonial power, time-being, and what Karen Barad calls “spacetimemattering.”
Each student should gain a new relationship to their own material choices through written reflection and individual investigation, and leave the class with an expanded idea of what a material is or can be. My hope is that we can find a greater understanding of the agencies at work in our material choices, how, when and why they matter, and how they might make meaning in the context of our own practice.
Selected readings: Karen Barad, Fred Moten, Democritus/Aristotle, Kim Tallbear, Pauline Oliveros, Sabina Spielrein, Joanna Radin, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, nuclear semiotics. Full bibliography upon request.
Possible units: Deconstructing or “destroying” readymade materials. The Death Drive, Failure. Edible substrates. AntiTime capsules (decay) OR What Shrodingers Cat says about Erwin Shrodinger. Coordination with Yale Forestry - ethics of “resources”, conservation and use of local plants. Demonstrating the double-slit experiment OR What the Newtonian Ether says about property rights. Homemade astrolabe, sundial, astrological vs. scientific prediction.
1 The title of this class is taken from the first line of a text from the committee on nuclear semiotics convened by the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant - a deep geological nuclear waste dump in New Mexico. Before it’s construction a committee was convened with the task of communicating grave danger to anyone who might come upon the site within a period of 10,000 years. They agreed on a written message, to be posted in all UN written languages, in spite the fact that these languages would be unlikely to survive that long.
Camille Altay 2019
Excerpt from Wikipedia:
“ Long-time nuclear waste warning messages are intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the Human Interference Task Force in 1981. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has done extensive research in development of these messages. Since today's written languages are unlikely to survive, the research team has considered pictograms and hostile architecture. Still, if a written message were to be used, the following text has been proposed to be translated to every UN written language:
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages ...pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.2
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.2
2 Trauth, K.M.; Hora, S.C.; Guzowski, R.V. (1 November 1993). "Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant". Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM (United States). doi:10.2172/10117359. Retrieved 21 March 2018.
Like, we tried to tell you.
Place and time are entangled distances which share a message of longing, longing to be, desiring to be desired... Hoping the future will long toward us enough to understand: flee immediately.
A civilization is powerless in the face of interpretation, but maybe just maybe can anticipate its own desire. The garbage that kills most is most attractive. Like the head of Nefertiti, an entombed reliquary, repulsive product of our mastery of nature, positive progress, industrialized power, a monument to destruction, monument to monument, monument to failure to monumentalize. Barrels and barrels of kitty litter underground. Only a sphinx could ask these unanswerable questions. Or shroedinger's cat.
Longing uttered through geological time must inevitably become set, like roman concrete, into the gutteral.
"That's all."
Wtf is this background supposed to be?
Aperture closing? Rings of Saturn? Dante’s inferno?
Ghosts come through
An Emanation, or a drain?
Ghosts come through
An Emanation, or a drain?
Nostrils, maybe.
Three hole that’s all
Three hole that’s all
Wormhole
Inside the intestine
Invitation
Vaginal opening
An infrastructure for gesture (stammering)
Portals
RHQ moons
Butthole
Escape route
Quantum tunnel
Clothing the bare electron, Quantum eraser (repression)
Inside the intestine
Invitation
Vaginal opening
An infrastructure for gesture (stammering)
Portals
RHQ moons
Butthole
Escape route
Quantum tunnel
Clothing the bare electron, Quantum eraser (repression)
A period which echoes. A black hole punctuation mark. Rabbit hole.
The WIPP documents are a way into the kind abstraction that's so real, it can't help but vaporize its own context... like nuclear war.
Albuquerque.
Wrong turn alternate universe, wassup.
_______________
From the show "This Place is a Message" at Area Gallery in Boston, 2019:
The field of “nuclear semiotics” began at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a deep geological repository constructed within a salt bed in New Mexico for the purposes of isolating the growing amount of transuranic waste from US nuclear defense programs. In 1981, a committee convened there to develop long-term messaging systems for nuclear waste, to communicate to anyone who might come upon the site as long as the material remained dangerous - within or beyond a period of 10,000 years. The teams of researchers came up with everything from pictograms of Munch’s The Scream, to genetically-engineered glowing cats, to "hostile architecture" in the form of a field of spikes.
In the end, the committee only agreed to one message, to be posted in the 6 official U.N. languages, despite the fact that there is no evidence any language is likely to survive 10,000 years. The title of this show comes from it’s first line:
This place is a message...
and part of a system of messages ...pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
To date, no signs exist at the site. Perhaps because it’s absurd, in any language. It's clearly troubled yet unapologetic, abjected yet self-aggrandizing, presumptuous but curt, and utterly contradictory. It is an existential, retroactive warning to ourselves more than to any other possible culture: The danger is “an emanation of energy," tells us it is formless, like a supernatural haunting. They say, pay attention to this place, but be repulsed by this place. In another century it might have said, "here there be dragons."
Language, image, representation, fails in the face of raw material. It shouts governmentally-sanctioned nonsense into the void, and the chasm to approach understanding just grows larger with each breath. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture, and yet our deadly waste will be our longest-lasting monument.
This material is neither yours, nor mine, but it is ours. This place is the message, and it exerts more power than our communication can bear to answer for. It is in many ways the price of asking language to do the work of physical matter. It's where asking hits a physical wall. Asking becomes a deconstruction that does not mean answering. It is a prompt to find out how meaning, signs, symbols come into being through material, and how materials become carriers of meaning, knowledge, and deep time. Its a provocation to reflect on how those materials speak to inheritances of power, time-being, and what Karen Barad calls “spacetimemattering.”
- Camille Altay, 2019 - ongoing
