History of Orford Ness

Mona Hatoum



Emily Richardson



Emily Richardson, UK: “Petrolia” (Still), 16mm film, 2005

• Excerpt of Memo Mori on Youtube
• Emily Richardson website
• Richardson's Cobra Mist [on Orford Ness]

Cyprien Gaillard, Dunepark (2009)

The Unofficial Countryside











































Not only was it a suprise to see a feature on Nick Papadimitriou on Newsnight last Thursday, there was the unexpected pleasure of seeing a short clip from Richard Mabey's 1975 TV programme The Unofficial Landscape.

Into Eternity (2010)

The focus of Michael Madsen's new documentary Into Eternity -- about the inconceivable task of securing nuclear waste deep underground for thousands of years -- is Onkalo in Finland. The Americans have a similar facility called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) located near Carlsbad, New Mexico. Not least among the problems faced by designers of such places is how to signpost a site for curious visitors poking around the site in, say, 10,000 years time.

 

Landscape of Thorns, concept by Michael Brill and drawing by Safdar
Abidi, from Marking the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for 10,000 Years



'Like the gaze of the exorcist, the gaze of the pollution-plagued contemporary is directed at something invisible. The risk society marks the dawning of a speculative age in everyday perception and thought. [...] Not until the step to cultural risk consciousness is everyday thought and imagination removed from its moorings in the world of the visible. In the struggle over risks of modernization we are no longer concerned with the specific value of that which appears to us in perception. What becomes the subject of controversy as to its degree of reality is instead what everyday consciousness does not see, and cannot perceive: radioactivity, pollutants and threats in the future' (Ulrich Beck, Risk Society 73)

• Into Eternity film website
• U.S. Department of Energy Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
• Expert Judgment on Markers To Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion Into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [Sandia National Laboratories report PDF]
• Charles C. Reith and N. Timothy Fisher, “Transuranic Waste Disposal: The WIPP Project,” in Charles C. Reith and Bruce M. Thomson, eds., Deserts as Dumps?: The Disposal of Hazardous Materials in Arid Ecosystems (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992) 303-318.
• Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002) 185-191.
• Peter C. van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
• Peter C. van Wyck, “American Monument: The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” in Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Scott C. Zeman and Michael A. Amundson, eds. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004) 149-172.  

The Andromeda Strain

Each floor of the bunker is a different colour, intended to reflect different psychological states. And matching paper uniforms.

Subterra

Decommissioned Atlas E missile base in Kansas.

 See also:

• Subterra Castle: Missile Silo Home, RoadsideAmerica.com
• 20th Century Castles, LLC

Fail-Safe

Almost entirely set inside an imagined presidential bunker, Fail-Safe (1964), along with Dr Strangelove (1964), established the subterranean control centre as the decisive absent presence of Cold War spatial politics.

Ken Adam

• Horatia Harrod, 'Ken Adam: The Man who Drew the Cold War,' The Telegraph, 28 Sep 2008.
• Piece on Ken Adam from The Journal of Geebird&Bamby Co.
• Frieze review of the 2000 Ken Adams exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London. Issue 51 March-April 2000.
• Tim Noakes, 'Ken Adam; Drawn to the Movies,' socialsterotype.com, 2008.
• BBC audiovisual slideshow on Ken Adam: 'Designing for 007'.

John Madin

BBC documentary on the Birmingham Brutalist from 1965.

Jonathan Olley

Edgar Lissel

German artist Edgar Lissel uses microorganisms to produce images in petri dishes, utilising the light-seeking behaviour of cyanobacteria as a photographic technique.

The series Bakterium – Wasser licht(et) Geschichte uses the Kilian submarine bunker in Kiel (now demolished) to consider the relationship between architecture, power, and ruins. The partially destroyed bunker is evident in the shapes emerging from the petri dishes.

The text below is from Lissel's website:

Bacterium

Bacteria - water light ( s ) history ( 1999/2000),
Bacterium - self portrayal (1999/2000) , and
Bacterium - Vanitas (2000/01 ).

All works of the three series are products of a special procedure, based on the property of certain bacteria to orientate themselves towards light. Using this dependency on light , bacterial cultures that were subjected Lissel kept in petri dishes filled with transparent agar solution to pictures. As a result darken , the bacteria grew and aligned themselves to the pictures in a way Comparable to photographic processes, where those spots on photographic paper that receive light, whereas those that are little exposed remain bright.

For bacteria - water light ( s ) history , photo negative were projected onto the bacterial cultures in classical photographic fashion. The pieces of the bacterium - Vanitas series, in contrast , are Comparable to photo grams : The objects were placed between the petri dish and the source of light , which was shining from below. The resulting images were then photographed and enlarged to about 80 cm ? (31.5 in.) . They reveal themselves in an ephemeral state, a fleeting moment in the organic cycle of growth and decay . Shadowy and fragile , they recall the early days of photography. They are also, however , products of the modern laboratory, documented and presented like a scientific experiment, in uniform shapes confined by the scientist's petri dishes.

For bacteria - self- portrayal, Lissel took microscopic pictures of the structures of single bacteria and projected onto petri dishes filled them with bacterial solution. As a consequence , the bacterial cultures reproduced their own micro -images . Normally indiscernible to the human eye, a multitude of organisms here can be observed creating a " super sign " of themselves , with their livelihood being a part of their self -portraits .

The series bacterium - water light ( s ) history comments on the potential transformation of architecture in ruins. As an example, Lissel used the submarine bunker " Kilian "in Kiel (which then stood in ruins, but was detonated later). The contours of the gigantic , partially destroyed bunker are vaguely visible. Some parts seem to drown in the water like a shipwreck , while others still stand tall , even if affected by decay , with somber , cave -like windows and concrete walls that seem to be several meters thick. The decline of the building counterposes with the gaining and fading of its symbolic representation in the petri dishes.

The transitoriness of all matter is a central theme of the third series , bacteria - Vanitas . Here Lissel employed classical still life motives such as fruit or animal corpses , whose disintegration is reflected in the petri dishes. The silhouettes of the bright objects are distinctly visible, yet one can also see that the bacteria started growing even in those places that received little light , such that they will eventually " outgrow "their own image. The representation fading away, however, symbolizes the coming death of the object itself.

In this complex field testing of references and counter-references , Lissel juxtaposes three time levels: first, there is the object which once existed but has since virtually dilapidated or decayed . The second level is that of the reproductions, of images that existed for a couple of days by means of bacterial movements , set up in a laboratory. The third one is created by photography, which captures those ephemeral moments and keeps them alive for a long time.

Jane & Louise Wilson

Sealander, The New Art Gallery Walsall, 14 December 2007 - 27 January 2008.

I missed this one completely. Here's what the Walsall gallery website says:

This exhibition, originally shown at Haunch of Venison in Zurich, consists of eight large-scale photographs and a multi-screen installation.

Black and white photographs show decayed, abandoned coastal bunkers. Though monolithic and compelling, these now useless edifices have become merely repositories for graffiti and litter, perhaps a place for shelter for local tramps. They occupy a place between land and sea. Though they carry the scars of battle, they now seem to defy any sense of time and place.

In the multi-screen installation, an exploration of the bunkers is inter-cut with footage of a rare deep sea squid, the Vampire Squid, which possesses the largest eye proportional to its body of any known creature. The eye of the squid seems to embody both the eye of the spectator and also of the camera as it moves constantly and fluidly through the sea or over the surfaces of the bunkers.

More information on this show, including installation views, can be found at the Haunch of Venison site. See also J.G. Ballard, 'A Handful of Dust,' The Guardian, Monday 20 March 2006, which is included in the Haunch of Venison catalogue for the show.

The vampire squid, according to the Sea and Sky website, 'is covered with light-producing organs called photophores. This gives the squid the unique ability to "turn itself on or off" at will through a chemical process known as bioluminescence. When the photophores are off, the squid is completely invisible in the dark waters where it lives. The squid has incredible control over these light organs. It has the ability to modulate the size and intensity of the photophores to create complex patterns that can be used to disorient predators and attract prey. The photophores are larger and more complex at the tips of the arms and the base of its two fins. Unlike most other squid, it does not have the ability to change its color. This ability would be useless in the dark environments in which it lives. The squid's light show is probably its main form of defense, since it lacks the ink sack which is present in other squid species. It can, however, eject a thick cloud of glowing, bioluminescent mucus from the tips of its arms when threatened.'

Abo Elementary School and Fallout Shelter

Armoured Crab

German Mobile Steel Pillbox
See the Lone Sentry site for information.

Tora Bora

Philip K. Dick

In Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth (1964), the outbreak of World War III prompts governments to bunker entire populations in huge underground shelters known as ‘ant tanks.’ As the war rages overhead, the subterranean masses are put to work manufacturing the robots that have replaced human combatants in the toxic conflict. Years pass, and the bunkered survivors watch on television as cities are incinerated and the president delivers morale-boosting messages that stress the need for increased productivity to meet the needs of the war effort. When a tank man burrows to the surface, however, he discovers that the war is long over and the robot armies his people have been building are in fact used as servants for a powerful conspiratorial elite that live in vast demesnes that have recovered from what was in fact a brief nuclear conflict. The destruction of cities and official bulletins are part of a global hoax, staged by those above ground to keep the earth free from its troglodyte hordes.

Bunker Busters

This last one is truly terrifying.

Marcel Breuer

Whitney Museum, New York, NY (1966)