Omer Fast, What the Drone Saw (2013)

Jean Gaumy, Sous-marin (2010)

Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie Ristelhueber from Laure Vermeersch on Vimeo.

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.  

Straight Up and Down

Cabinet Magazine 11 2003

Fiona Banner, Tate Britain Duveens Commission 2010

Lakenheath and Mildenhall

United States Air Force information film prepared by Detachment 1, AETC Training Support Squadron, Lackland AFB, Texas, introducing the Lakenheath airbase and surrounding region.



Assignment Mildenhall, another information film for US air personnel.

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.