CLUI: Centers of the USA

See the exhibit Centers of the USA, at the Centers of the USA! A mobile exhibition unit containing the exhibit Centers of the USA, produced by the Institute of Marking and Measuring and the Center for Land Use Interpretation, will be hitting the road on August 8, 2011, to visit a number of the official Centers of the USA. Come and see the show, and feel the resonance of the concurrent and concentric centers. A once in a lifetime opportunity! Tour schedule: August 8: Departs the Center of the Contiguous Continental United States, at Lebanon, Kansas. August 9: Arrives at the Population Center of the USA at Plato, Missouri (determined by the 2010 census). August 12: Arrives at the Geographic Center of all 50 States of the USA, at Belle Fourche, South Dakota. (The exhibit unit will be located at the Center of the Nation Information Center in Belle Fourche until 2pm, then it will relocate to the actual surveyed location, 20 miles north of town.) August 14: The mobile exhibition unit returns to Lebanon, Kansas. Exhibit is free of charge and open to the public. Follow the Tour of the Centers of the USA onFacebook. This project is part of the CLUI Lines of Site thematic program, an ongoing series of presentations about surveying, cartographic lines, perimeters, and borders. The Centers of the USA exhibit is a co-production of the Institute for Marking and Measuring (IMAM), and the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), with additional support by the Salina Art Center, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Creative Capital. ---- The Center for Land Use Interpretation 9331 Venice Blvd. Culver City, CA 90232 310.839.5722 office 310.839.6678 fax clui@clui.org www.clui.org ---- The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a non-profit organization dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.

CLUI exhibition: HEART OF SCREENLAND

HEART OF SCREENLAND
A Neighborhood Exhibition in Three Parts

on view starting April 29, 2011

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The Center for Land Use Interpretation
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310.839.5722
clui@clui.org
www.clui.org

Exhibit is open 12 - 5 PM, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, or by appointment.
Admission is free.

Directions

The Edge of Light: Wendover, by Brian Rosa and Adam Ryder

"The Edge of Light: Wendover," by Brian Rosa and Adam Ryder has just been published in the online journal Places. Their work originated at the Center for Land Use Interpretation's residency program in Wendover, Utah, where military history, land-speed racing and the casino industry make for unexpected juxtapositions.

Winter edition of the Center for Land Use Interpretation's The Lay of the Land

The Winter 2011 edition of the Center for Land Use Interpretation's The Lay of the Land newsletter is now available!
Read it online at www.clui.org, or subscribe to receive a print copy.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a non-profit organization dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.

William Lamson at The Boiler | A Line Describing the Sun

William Lamson at The Boiler
A Line Describing the Sun
10 Sept – 10 Oct, 2010

Opening Reception
10 Sept, 2010 7-9 pm

Press Release

A Line Describing the Sun features a new two-channel video and sculpture created in the Mojave Desert earlier this year. Begun at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s artist-in-residence program in Wendover, Utah, Lamson finished the project in a dry lakebed west of Barstow, California. The video and sculpture are both a record of two day-long performances in which the artist follows the sun with a large Fresnel lens mounted on a rolling apparatus. The lens focuses the sun into a 1,600-degree point of light that melts the dry mud, transforming it into a black glassy substance. Over the course of a day, as the sun moves across the sky, a hemispherical arc is imprinted into the lakebed floor.

The original performance documented in the video produced a 366-foot arc. The sculpture on view in the gallery is a 23-foot scale model of this mark, created using the same apparatus over the same amount of time, only traveling at a slower pace. Lamson excavated the mark by pouring water over it, softening the dry mud on either side of the line and eventually causing the insoluble glass to separate from its muddy surrounding. Over the course of the excavation, the single continuous line broke into hundreds of pieces. Its reconstruction in the gallery simultaneously evokes the geologic record and an archeological relic.

While Lamson’s video works have often found him playfully and strenuously interacting with his environment (both in the natural world and in his studio), this new work brings to bear the forces of nature in the act of drawing and mark-making. In this way, it continues the investigations he began with Automatic, a project in which he used wind and ocean currents to power a series of drawing machines. A Line Describing the Sun is part performance, part video work, part earthwork, and part drawing exercise.

This will be Lamson’s fourth one-person exhibition with Pierogi. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and other private collections. His work has been shown in the US and internationally, including at P.S. 1 (NYC) and Franklin Art Works (Minneapolis). He completed his MFA at Bard College and is a recent MacDowell Foundation Fellow.

This project was supported by the Center for Land Use Interpretation artists-in-residence program and a grant from the Experimental Television Center

THE CENTERS OF THE USA: CLUI KS

An exhibit in Lebanon, Kansas (center of the contiguous continental United States):

THE CENTERS OF THE USA
Open indefinately starting August 14, 2010

The Centers of the USA, produced by the Institute of Marking and Measuring and the CLUI, is now open to visitors.

A CLUI Exhibit Unit, temporarily installed at the center of the contiguous continental United States, north of Lebanon, Kansas, contains an exhibit which depicts and describes several of the "Centers" of the United States, such as the geodetic center, in Lucas, Kansas; the geographic center, near Belle Fourche, South Dakota; and the current population center, in Edgar Springs, Missouri.

This project is part of the CLUI Lines of Site thematic program, an ongoing series of presentations about surveying, cartographic lines, perimeters, and borders. It was made possible with the support of the Salina Art Center, Creative Capital, the Hub Club of Lebanon, KS, and the Institute of Marking and Measuring (IMAM).

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The Center for Land Use Interpretation
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310.839.5722 office
310.839.6678 fax
clui@clui.org
www.clui.org

CLUI: Through the Grapevine Bus Tour

The Center for Land Use Interpretation presents:

Through the Grapevine Bus Tour
Thursday August 12, 2010

Join us for a tour of a place meant to be passed through - a tour, essentially, of a highway. We will visit contemporary and historic lines of conveyance through the transitional geography between Central and Southern California - the epic Tejon Pass region.

The tour is part of the CLUI exhibit Through the Grapevine: Streams of Transit in Southern California's Great Pass, on display until August 29, 2010.

The bus will depart from the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Los Angeles location at 9331 Venice Blvd, Culver City at 9 AM Thursday, August 12th, and will return by 7 PM.

Tour ticket price is $30. Tickets go on sale on Tuesday, August 3rd @ 12 noon PST, and must be purchased online here.

This tour is made possible by a grant from the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles and the CLUI Remarkable Roadways Program.

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The Center for Land Use Interpretation
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310.839.5722 office
310.839.6678 fax
clui@clui.org
www.clui.org

Directions

DAVID TAYLOR: Working the Line, CLUI Independent Interpreter

Independent Interpreter presentation at the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Los Angeles location:
DAVID TAYLOR: Working the Line
Wednesday August 4, 2010 at 7:00 pm (Please arrive early, seating is limited.)

David Taylor's project "Working the Line" documents 276 obelisks, installed between the years 1892 and 1895, that mark the U.S./Mexico boundary from El Paso/Juarez to San Diego/Tijuana. He will present this work, and describe his experiences along this often remote and dramatic linear and liminal space.

Image: Border Monument No. 184 - N 32º 09.347’ W 113º 42.403’

This talk is the third in a series of CLUI Independent Interpreter presentations which are part of an ongoing investigation of the nation's political and physical boundaries. The CLUI Independent Interpreter program is made possible by the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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The Center for Land Use Interpretation
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310.839.5722 office
310.839.6678 fax
clui@clui.org
www.clui.org

Admission is free.

Directions

CLUI exhibition: THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE: Streams of Transit in Southern California's Great Pass

New exhibit at the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Los Angeles location:

THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE: Streams of Transit in Southern California's Great Pass
Exhibit open from April 23, 2010

The mountainous passage that separates the great population of Southern California from the rest of the state is a zone of transit, from one epic region to another. Located at the collision of the San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountain Ranges, this steep and convoluted terrain lies between the northern edge of the Los Angeles megalopolis and the depopulated place known as Grapevine, at the southern end of the Central Valley. Layers of traffic, water, and energy move like a braided stream through the mountainous terrain, connecting here to there.

This exhibit is made possible by a grant from the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles and the CLUI Remarkable Roadways Program.

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The Center for Land Use Interpretation
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310.839.5722 office
310.839.6678 fax
clui@clui.org
www.clui.org

Exhibit is open 12 - 5 PM, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, or by appointment.
Admission is free.

Directions

SPRING ISSUE OF LAY OF THE LAND

The Spring 2010 edition of the Center for Land Use Interpretation's The Lay of the Land newsletter is now available on the Center's newly redesigned website!

Click here to receive a print copy of the Lay of the Land newsletter.

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The Center for Land Use Interpretation
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310.839.5722 office
310.839.6678 fax
clui@clui.org
www.clui.org

FENCE DITCH REPEAT: New exhibit and public presentation at the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Los Angeles

FENCE DITCH REPEAT: Iterations of the Border at Juárez/El Paso
Exhibit opens on Friday March 5, 2010

A CLUI Independent Interpreter exhibit featuring the work of Sarah Cowles and Alan Smart.

Sound by John Also Bennett.
Independent Interpreter event - Sarah Cowles will talk about the exhibit Fence Ditch Repeat on Saturday, March 13 at 7:30pm. (Please arrive early, seating is limited.)

This Center for Land Use Interpretation Independent Interpreter program is made possible by the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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The Center for Land Use Interpretation
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310.839.5722 office
310.839.6678 fax
clui@clui.org
www.clui.org

Exhibit is open 12 - 5 PM, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, or by appointment.
Admission is free.

OPPORTUNISTIC VISTAS: The Films of Cynthia Hooper AT CLUI CULVER CITY

OPPORTUNISTIC VISTAS: The Films of Cynthia Hooper
Exhibit open January 22 - February 28, 2010

Cynthia Hooper creates short films that observe sites such as waste disposal landscapes, effluent pipes, and salt mines. This CLUI Independent Interpreter exhibit features seven of Hooper’s films: CESPT, Cuyahoga, Bay Dredge, Cummings Road Landfill, Lazaro Cardenas Electrizada, Basura Quemada, and La Morita Enamorada.

Opening night event - Cynthia Hooper will talk about trans-border water issues in the Mexicali Valley of Mexico and the Imperial Valley of Southern California, and will screen her latest film, Meximperiali on Friday, January 22 at 8pm. Please arrive early - seating is limited.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310.839.5722 office
310.839.6678 fax
clui@clui.org
www.clui.org

Exhibit is open 12 - 5 PM, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, or by appointment.
Admission is free.

LAND/ART WEB EXHIBITION LAUNCHES TODAY

In collaboration with Bill Gilbert (Land Arts of the American West) and Suzanne Sbarge (516 ARTS) smudge is proud to announce the launch of the LAND/ART web-exhibition hosted by extrememediastudies.org. The web-exhibition is an online archive of the myriad works, events, lectures, and projects that unfolded in New Mexico for the LAND/ART project from June - November 2009.

Visit the exhibition here.

CLUI tour of the Oilscape of Los Angeles (Cynthia Hooper)

From Cynthia Hooper via the LandArts Listserve:

Part I:


Part II:

A Bus Tour of the Urban Oilscape of Los Angeles

A Bus Tour of the Urban Oilscape of Los Angeles
Friday, December 18, 2009

The tour will visit a number of urban well sites, from the West Side to Downtown, to Signal Hill and Long Beach, as part of the exhibit Urban Crude: The Oil Fields of the Los Angeles Basin.

The bus will depart from the Center for Land Use Interpretation's exhibit space at 9331 Venice Blvd, Culver City, California, at 9 AM Friday, December 18th, and will return by 6 PM. Please be at the CLUI no later than 8:50am to board the bus. Bring lunch money - a stop will be made at a restaurant for lunch.

Tour ticket price is $30. Tickets go on sale on Monday, December 7th @ 12 noon PST, and must be purchased online here.

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The Center for Land Use Interpretation
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310.839.5722 office
310.839.6678 fax
support (at) clui (dot) org
www.clui.org

URBAN CRUDE: NEW CLUI EXHIBITION

New exhibit open at the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Los Angeles location:

URBAN CRUDE:
The Oil Fields of the Los Angeles Basin
Open to the public starting October 30th, 2009

"The fabric of Los Angeles, a continuous cloth of development, draped on the surface of the land, is shallow, but its roots, thousands of meandering straws of oil, dig deep into the soil. Like tree roots, these veins extract the living essence of the ground, fueling this city of the car. Like historical roots, these oil fields are the progenerative substrate, the resource pool, where the economy of Los Angeles originated, driving the development and culture of the city. Today, it continues. Los Angeles is the most urban oil field, where the industry operates in cracks, corners, and edges, hidden behind fences, and camouflaged into architecture, pulling oil out from under our feet." - from the CLUI site, read more here.

smudge studio's research trip to the American nuclear west makes the New York Times

click for larger image

Last summer smudge's research road trip throughout the Southwest took us to sites that we learned about thanks to Matt Coolidge of The CLUI and Colin Robertson, Bill Fox, Ann Wolfe, Sara Frantz of the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment.

A small bit of the story of our trip made it into the New York Times today. Huge thanks to our colleagues for the invaluable residencies they made possible for us at the Nevada Museum of Art archives and The CLUI's Wendover base and Los Angeles archives.

LA Times reviews LAND/ART

MARKING THE SPOT: A wooden stake in a hydrogen bomb impact site,
part of a project by the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
(CLUI Photo Archive and LAND/ART / May 26, 2009)

A full page review of LAND/ART appeared in last Sunday's LA TIMES (August 16). In "The Shifting Nature of Earth Artists," Susan Emerling argues that land art used to be a practice of monumental terms and scale, but 50 years later, it has evolved into forms with "more low-key aspirations."

From Bill Gilbert's Matter of Fact: Walk to Work, to Basia Irland's ecologically based riparian restoration "performances" on the Rio Grande, to the CLUI's temporary "Landscape Exhibit Unit" located at the intersection between New Mexico's nuclear past and present and its high-tech industries, Emerling traces the reflections of this evolution in LAND/ART's festival of coordinated exhibitions, lectures, symposia, film screenings, blogs, public installations and site-specific sculptures.

She concludes that today's land/earth artists want their audiences to "take away a new perception of the Earth and their place in it."

While contemporary land art works may be less "macho and heroic" than those of the first generation of land artists, artists' aspirations to shift how we humans see and live in relation to Earth are no less monumental.

Basia Irland's "receding/reseeding." Photo by Claire Long

Artisode 2.1: CLUI on KNME

Click here to view the video on KNME's website.

CLUI's Bus Tour of New Mexico's superlative ground-sky resonances

"...Instant annihilation. Once we've done that, gotten it out of our system, what else can we do? We can go forward."--Matt Coolidge, Director, The Center for Land Use Interpretation

smudge photo

On June 27, smudge and 55 others boarded a bus to--we didn't know exactly where. Neither did our tour guide, Matt Coolidge, Director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. That's the way Matt ensures that each trip is responsive to its own unfolding. His work as CLUI's director includes curating and performing periodic bus excursions-as-collective research for the Center's land use interpretation projects.

This one, entitled "Reflections on the Land of Enchantment," was offered as part of the recent LAND/ART symposium weekend. Now, it's part of the lives of 55 people who were drawn to CLUI's tour description:

"The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) will take passengers on a guided bus tour through some of the more compelling and dramatic built landscapes of New Mexico, places at the core of this landscape-centered state. The tour will examine the cultural stratigraphy of the contemporary technological sublime; the veneer of test space; the reach upwards; the security of entombment; and the flare of the nuclear furnace."

The nine hour odyssey took us from Albuquerque "up the mesa" to Los Alamos, through security gates into the highly restricted Los Alamos National Lab. Here, the Manhattan Project mobilized what Matt called "a landscape machine" as it integrated sites and landscapes nationwide to extract, collect, concentrate, refine, and form rare elements into a few pounds of fissible material: "a global concentration of power." Our unprecedented crossing by bus into the Lab served as the trip's fulcrum. From there, we then turned "downstream" of the nuclear flow generated at the top of the mesa, and headed back and down that stream through Santa Fe to the mines, ranches, and changing communities of Cerrillos, Madrid, and Galisteo.

On the way up the mesa, Matt set up the thematic "lens." He then invited us to use that lens to see and make sense of the immediate New Mexican landscape, its human-built veneer as well as its human-altered sub-surface, and their histories. The tour would take the branding of New Mexico as "The Land of Enchantment" literally. Matt invited us to consider the reality of the celebrated resonances and tensions between the ground and the sky that exist here. And to follow the resulting "vibration" between sky and ground--to the nuclear: the spell of the man-made sun, the blinding white light of the truth that is also the death unleashed by the bomb.

The format of CLUI bus tours requires passengers to literally "go there" themselves. As Matt pointed out about the saying "been there, done that:" you haven't done it 'till you've been there. So, rather than attempt a descriptive narrative of the journey in a linear fashion, smudge offers the following creative responses conjured in us by the process of moving with the CLUI through this particular landscape, on a journey from the cradle to the grave of the bomb.

Enchanting


Matt spun a series of images and metaphors as we headed for Los Alamos--playing off New Mexico's reputation (and "branding") as the Land of Enchantment. He suggested that the sense of enchantment here might be very real--not an illusion or commercial ploy.

"This sense of the technological sublime in New Mexico runs from the earthships of Taos to the test tracks of Holloman; from the Virgin Gallactic tourist spaceports of Upham, to the alien crash sites of Roswell;. . . from the Very Large Array to the very large pointy spikes of Lightning Field; ... from the hollow nuclear chambers of the Manzano Mountains to the electromagnetic pulse test trestles of Kirtland. This land was made by you and me."--Matt Coolidge, on the way up the mesa

Nothing less than a "synthetic sun" was created in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. It was engineered by people whose imaginations and efforts stretched between terra firma and the stars, between the (under)ground and the sun. Its conception and fabrication took place on a mesa formed by giant fingers of an ancient volcanic flow. The "little town" built at the top of the mesa was inhabited by scientists seeking both the dawn of a new age and the end of a war.

Trying to be human and beyond human at the same time, they levitated momentarily between ground (a solid sense of what we know) and sky (what will always exceed us). Matt asked us to consider how these two poles became superlative here, and to sense them here, above all other places, as real.

New Mexico is the cradle of the nuclear. It is also its grave, the site of burial for nuclear waste generated by weapons research and production. Cradle: The Trinity "Test" (Jornada del Muerto). Grave: WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Carlsbad, NM).

"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds." -Physicist Freeman Dyson, as spoken in the film The Day After Trinity

Ex cursion

smudge photo

"Excursion" is an apt name for a CLUI bus tour. Maybe more so for this particular tour than any other.

Excursion is defined as a "deviation in argument," a "departure or deviation from a direct or normal course." People familiar with the CLUI's work would likely recognize both of these definitions as appropriate for a CLUI trip.

But "excursion" is also a term used in the nuclear industry. There, it means:

"A criticality accident, sometimes referred to as an excursion or a power excursion, occurs when a nuclear chain reaction accidentally occurs in fissile material, such as enriched uranium or plutonium. This releases neutron radiation which is highly dangerous to surrounding personnel and causes induced radioactivity in the surroundings."--wikipedia

Our CLUI excursion did indeed reach a state of criticality as it unleashed a chain reaction of meanings and implications among sites both unusual and the exemplary (CLUI'S criteria for the sites that it includes in its land use database and bus tours). As we turned to come back down the mesa, Matt launched into a miles-long, seemingly never-ending litany that compounded: names of multitudes of weaponized "Technical Areas" that occupy the mesa and make up the Lab; names of sci-fi sounding projects and operations that take place within those areas; billions of dollars being spent there today; endless restricted areas; sites of unexploded ordinances; "danger" signs along our route. All of these bounced off of juxtapositions that strained credulity. On our left: the site of 49 small nuclear tests that took place in tunnels, while across the canyon on our right: Bandelier's ancient cliff dwellings. On our left at the tip of a lobe of the mesa that points our way back toward Santa Fe and Albuquerque: Tech Area 54's radioactive nuclear waste site holding enough waste to fill an estimated 1.5 million 55 gallon drums; while on our right and just below TA 54: the suburban community of White Rock and its 6000 inhabitants. And all of this uphill from everything living below. Connected to it, resonating with it, via gravity, and a matter of time. Matt comments:

"It will take awhile for it to migrate, but it definitely will."

smudge photo

Atomic Ed

Or, as Ed Grothus, former Los Alamos machinist and founder of Los Alamos' Black Hole put it:

"What goes into the Laboratory comes out of the Laboratory."

As we headed down the mesa, Matt popped a video into the bus's player and we watched Atomic Ed and the Black Hole, a documentary by Ellen Spiro. It chronicles Ed Grothus' campaign to raise and change consciousness about what takes place on the mesa.

smudge photo

"Over 30 years ago, Ed quit his job making "better" atomic bombs and he began collecting what he calls "nuclear waste", non-radioactive high-tech discards from the Los Alamos National Laboratory which are auctioned off dirt cheap every month in a gigantic government yard sale.

As the self-appointed curator of an unofficial museum of the nuclear age called "The Black Hole", Ed reveals a history of government waste that was literally thrown in a trash heap. By transforming his ironic junkyard into a genuine museum, Ed hopes to preserve the artifacts of Los Alamos' hidden history."--Mobilus Media /atomic.html

Ed passed away in February, 2009, but his surplus-store-as-museum continues to offer an excursive view of the Los Alamos Lab and its history. Our stop at the Black Hole and Spiro's video were pivotal. They turned us from the glitter of stars and synthetic suns to the deeply material infrastructures of nuclear industries.

Obsolescence

smudge photo

“We shape our tools and afterward our tools shape us.” --Marshall McLuhan

"We created, in the bomb, the means to end not just a war, but existence, all life, the world itself, at the press of a button. Technology evolved to the absolute limit in one direction."--Matt Coolidge on the way up the mesa

We signed up for CLUI's bus tour in the midst of a 32 day research trip to archives and various land use sites across the West and Southwest. We are focusing on how human uses of the nuclear alter the geologic--especially in terms of deep time (past and future).

Blowback: Unintended negative effects suffered from one's own weapons or actions.

Our repeated encounters with historical and contemporary human attempts to use the nuclear as a form of power have left us thinking that the term "nuclear technology" may be a misnomer. Given the blowback (environmental, strategic, economic, moral, psychological) that results from any use of so-called nuclear technology as weapon or as source of power ... we might be forgiven for thinking that this "technology" is, finally, useless. Any use of it produces, ultimately, more work than it accomplishes. It has, after all, not only generated untold amounts of human suffering and cost ... it now seems to have enslaved contemporary humans and countless unborn generations with the task of working for it, rather than the other way around. Humans are now obligated for thousands of years to come to dispose of, shield, and keep track of what the nuclear does best: render vast quantities of the earth's materials and human-made objects both lethal and obsolete.

Perhaps nuclear technology is the ultimate generator of obsolescence--uselessness. If so, it breaches the limit of what constitutes a technology by becoming a "tool" that can't be used. Except to make or assist the accelerated decay of what has been made, of materiality itself.

The Geologic

smudge photos of aerial and topological views of Los Alamos

Traveling with the CLUI is to travel in direct and intimate proximity to the processes and degrees to which humans have altered the landscape. It is from such exposure (also by way of CLUI newsletters, database research, residencies, exhibitions) that land use has taken on real and material form for us. Over the years, our work and individual capacities for sensing such forces have expanded in turn.

On the way down the mesa we began to imagine potential responses to our day with the CLUI. Our focus came to rest on the geological forces upon which we were traveling.

"Geologically speaking, the history of Los Alamos is vastly more explosive and cataclysmic than its better known, recent atomic past. Compacted pumice and ash fallout "drape our cliffs like a snowfall" (Heiken) - the result of 17 million years of volcanic activity. A crack in the crust of New Mexico's earth, known as the Rio Grande Rift, has been widening for the past 20 to 30 million years..."
- exhibit caption on the "Natural landscape" of Los Alamos at the Los Alamos Historical Society

Los Alamos: volcanic fingers. The land we had just transversed might have been terra firma for LANL infrastructure since 1945, but it was once pure moment and flow. As hard as it is to imagine, even this distant reality is only a short chapter in an immensely longer and varied geological tale.

Though human nuclear intervention into the landscape of New Mexico is deep, wide, and total, at this point it is actually quite shallow in terms of geologic time. The sixty years of land alteration that took place at LANL can easily be swallowed by the tectonic furnace.

It appears (to us) that there is at least one force continuously able to meet and exceed the nuclear, and that is the geologic. The nuclear waste that humans continue to generate will last much longer than what future humans might remember as the nuclear era. The planet will far outlive the waste we are burying in it. The chance that humans will outlive that waste is less likely.

When situated within the context of the geologic, the topic of nuclear land use becomes something else. It becomes something less about "destruction" of the earth and more about a distinct and dramatic alteration of what it means to be human on the planet from this point forward. How will all life have to bend and reshape in response- far into an unknown future? Our potential to imagine our species moving forward in geologic time becomes compromised by the depth of our present nuclear realities. The fundamental geologic forces of the Earth (plate tectonics, the Earth's continuous recycling of land itself) are, however, unmoved by human uses of the nuclear.

It is through direct, embodied experience of land use that our (smudge's) capacity to sense geologic time has developed. Grasping geologic time is about being "there" and "feeling it for ourselves." It is through land use interpretation that the immense degree to which humans have altered the landscape of the earth begins to take on significant and three dimensional meaning. The nuclear totality is humbled when land use is contextualized within the geologic. Human intervention in the geologic is relatively short. What this means for humans today, at this contemporary moment, is something that is wide open to creative response.

broken arrow

Matt Coolidge will take the results of the CLUI's collective research excursion in New Mexico and make them a part of an interpetive facility that the CLUI will open on August 1. Part of LAND/ART, it will be housed in a mobile office structure on the edge of ABQ--in the vicinity of the site of "Broken Arrow."

Broken Arrow nuclear accident site,
just south of the Albuquerque airport
(smudge photo)