Gian Pablo @ ITP

The Yucca Mountain WIPP is a repository for radioactive waste, mostly coming from nuclear weapons programs. The materials stored there will remain dangerous for 10,000 years. In terms of human civilization, that is a very long time. It is unlikely that our culture, language or civilization will survive unchanged for that long. Hence, the problem of communicating the danger of the place is extremely interesting.

The Department of Energy commissioned 2 separate teams of artists, anthropologists, science-fiction writers and scientists to develop a system of warning signs. They selected those elements of the system where both teams were in agreement.

This installation is based on the design specification, and the proposals from both teams. All the material used is taken from these documents - no additional content was created or introduced.

I have been attracted to this material for a number of reasons:

1) It deals with BIG themes - cultural evolution, the end of our civilization, the need to communicate with future generations. In some ways the Yucca Mountain project is a direct precursor of Danny Hillis' 10,000 Year Clock.

2) The material is aesthetically interesting - the attempt to simplify the key messages into a form that could be communicated over vast spans of time led to some extremely poetic phrases. (This is an interesting topic to pursue further). For example, this is the Level II message, the message to be communicated by the site itself, without the use of words:

Level II Message

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 towardsa 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.

3) The challenges faced by the design team are unusual - they set out to design a place that would *repel* intruders, not attract them. They needed to show that effort was made to build the place, but simultaneously show that it is not a valued place. The focus on fear/disgust/sickness as key messages is unusual and interesting.

4) Many of the recommended design features appear in many surviving monuments from the ancient world: monolithic construction, extremely high precision in construction, use of astronomical alignments to communicate dates, etc. (This is another area to pursue further...)

5) I am interested in the problem of communication and misunderstanding, especially as relates to technology and its effects.

Design of the piece

In general, I am pleased with how the installation worked out. The overall construction, using 3/4 inch metal pipes, wire, and wax paper seemed to disappear, and most of the focus was on the projection.

The artistic focus of the piece is on difficulty of communication, the difficulty of establishing that a message is being sent. As such, I was not interested in making the piece especially legible - I wanted the experience to be of perceiving interesting, yet frustratingly inaccessible fragments of information.

Rather than using the more explicit Level III and Level IV messages, we based the narrative of the piece on the Level II messages, the ones that are meant to be implicit in the design of the site, and not communicated via words.

We chose imagery that is graphically strong, clearly freighted with meaning, yet somehow impenetrable. The installation starts with very clear scientific and geologic diagrams, but then transitions into the ominous proposals from the design teams.

Ultimately, the urgent attempt to communicate the danger of the site is superseded by the danger itself, as the Cerenkov blue imagery of clouds and particles grows brighter and illuminates the screens from behind.

Critique

We received a number of useful critiques and observations:

1) Brightness of the rear projection. It was not obvious at first that there was a projection from the back. This was partly due to the use of a somewhat dimmer projector than expected, and partly due to the way the footage was edited to fade in. I could easily have boosted brightness on the whole thing.

2) Pacing and brightness of the rear projection. The rear projection had no clear milestones, it just faded in smoothly over the course of 5 minutes. It would have made sense to introduce "flashes" or pulsing, to flag that something is happening and draw attention to the rear projection.

3) Choreographing the rips in the screens with the video. The rips in the screens were made haphazardly. It would have been interesting to edit the videos so that specific content elements lined up with the holes, providing a more structured three-dimensional experience.

4) Pacing of the video edits. Since the ripped screens disrupt the graphics, it becomes difficult to apprehend what they are saying, or what they represent. A slower pace than is typical for a single channel installation would have been useful.

5) More use of motion. I purposely restricted the use of motion in the projected graphics, choosing a more staccato style of editing. However, the two or three exceptions to this were very well received. I realize that motion also helps to comprehend the imagery across the multiple screens, and that it really plays well to the depth achieved through the layered screens.

6) Sound. This piece would have been much more atmospheric with a soundtrack. In fact, we had considered making a soundtrack by combining recordings of the famous "number stations" with some electronic tones. Click here for a sample. The number stations seemed appropriate because they are also an example of a cryptic message "in plain sight". Also, the number stations are probably tied to espionage activity, some of which would have been connected to the nuclear weapons which are the source for much of the material stored at Yucca Mountain.

7) Size. The piece would be much more impressive on a large r scale. In fact, we had planned it as such, but the pipes we got from Ace Hardware turned out to be two feet shorter than expected. For a second iteration, I would also use a "portrait" orientation for the screens, to get away from the obvious video-screen-ness of the conventional 4x3 format.

It is likely that I will rebuild the installation taking note of these critiques - I can see how they can make it considerably more powerful.