More on The Last Pictures

Trevor Paglen - The Last Pictures from Creative Time on Vimeo.

Last Pictures Orbit Visualization from Trevor Paglen on Vimeo.

TIME article
Walker Art Center article
e-flux interview

Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie Ristelhueber from Laure Vermeersch on Vimeo.

Paleocontact

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.  

Spiral Exhalations

From Edgar Allan Poe, "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833):

We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were bound. One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a very singular, isolated cloud, to the N. W. It was remarkable, as well for its color, as from its being the first we had seen since our departure from Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset, when it spread all at once to the eastward and westward, girting in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking like a long line of low beach. My notice was soon afterwards attracted by the duskyred appearance of the moon, and the peculiar character of the sea. The latter was undergoing a rapid change, and the water seemed more than usually transparent. Although I could distinctly see the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found the ship in fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably hot, and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar to those arising from heated iron. As night came on, every breath of wind died away, and a more entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration. However, as the captain said he could perceive no indication of danger, and as we were drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the sails to be furled, and the anchor let go. No watch was set, and the crew, consisting principally of Malays, stretched themselves deliberately upon deck. I went below — not without a full presentiment of evil. Indeed every appearance warranted me in apprehending a Simoom. I told the captain my fears — but he paid no attention to what I said, and left me without deigning to give a reply. My uneasiness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about midnight I went upon deck. As I placed my foot upon the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was startled with a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a mill-wheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks from stem to stern.

Impact Event

The resurrection of a credible theory of catastrophism among scientists during the 1980s to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs was in part, as Doug Davis has argued, made possible by Cold War technology. Davis posits a complex interrelationship between military-scientific work in impact-explosion craters caused by nuclear detonations and impact-extinction theory in geology and palaeontology. The study of bomb craters, for example, enabled the verification of the effects of impact explosions for palaeontologists, while the dinosaur apocalypse reconstructed from the geological record draws its vocabulary of destruction from Cold War rhetoric—“target properties”, “projectiles”, “fallout”, “bombardment”, and so on—as well as providing a plausible scenario of a post-nuclear world. Deep time produces evidence of the future anterior, the will-have-been: “The same regime of signs”, claims Davis, “is at work after a nuclear holocaust in the 1980s as after a catastrophic impact 65 million years ago” (497). Impact-extinction scientists were not funded by the military, yet their findings were inseparable from the work of Cold War science; as such, Davis concludes, the “state of conflict itself enabled the theory’s development” (506; original emphasis).

Reference

Davis, Doug. '“A Hundred Million Hydrogen Bombs”: Total War in the Fossil Record,' Configurations 9.3 (2001): 461-508.

Planet of the Apes

'Nature will surely come to her own again. Nothing human is of long duration. Men and their deeds are obliterated, the race itself fades; but Nature goes calmly on with her projects' -- John C. Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1901), p. 62.

'Enfranchisement was an historical event' -- Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso.1988), p. 112.

Dirty Wars: Available 1 December 2009

For more information click here.