plumbbob

eleven songs for the hydrogen jukebox

‘everything, even the explosions in the distances might stay as long as they were to no purpose … as long as no one had to die … couldn’t it be that way? only excitement, sound and light, a storm approaching in the summer (to live in a world where that would be the day’s excitement), only kind thunder?’ (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow)

Introduction: eleven songs

In 2003, I made a performance called Eleven Songs with a friend Katja Wolf, as part of the Goat Island summer school in Chicago. It was in 11 parts. The materials I generated came out of drifting around an area on the South Side of Chicago to consider what remained of things that were no longer there – and where sounds went when they’re not heard anymore. In particular, I was drawn to the Slaughteryards – ‘Packingtown’ – ‘Porkopolis’ – the biggest meat processing site in America which had closed in 1971 after more than 100 years in operation. It was huge - a square mile of scientifically rationalized ‘dis/assembly lines’, in which it was claimed that every part of the pig was used ‘apart from the squeal’. By 1893 1/5^th of all Chicago workers were employed there in notoriously appalling conditions. It’s clear it was an extreme place, full of noise and blood and poverty – and the primary air polluter in Illinois for many years.

In Upton Sinclair’s famous book about the Union Stockyards The Jungle (1906), he wrote: ‘One could not stand and watch very long without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere on the earth, or above the earth, where they were requited for all this suffering?’

In one of many books about hauntings in Chicago - mysterious presences located in particular places around the city - I came across the story of the pig’s squeal that some people claimed could still be heard in this area.

So, I walked and drifted in search of whatever traces I might find: in particular I was looking for whatever remained of one building. After a great deal of getting lost, eventually I found what I was looking for: or rather the empty space where it once stood …

On the edge of the former Slaughteryards, at 4300 Halsted, an abandoned site that had been the International Amphitheatre - this was where the Beatles had played a concert in 1964, on their 1^st national US tour, it was the time of ‘Beatlemania’, the Ed Sullivan show, and so on. A young Lin Hixson was there with her older sister. All she could remember were tiny figures in the distance, she could barely see them – and the incessant screaming. During my research, I discovered that the Beatles were showered with thousands of jelly-beans after a casual remark by George Harrison that had been picked up by the media – it was his ‘favorite snack food’.

They played for 34 minutes – they played 11 songs – and were paid 30,000 dollars.

This same building had been used for big political conventions: during the Cold War era, half of all Democratic & Republican National Conventions had been held there. Including in 1968, the infamous Democratic National Convention – scene of anti-war protestors, the Yippies’ “Festival of Life”, Mayor Daley’s notoriously hard-line police crackdown – conflict between the ‘flower children’ and the ‘pigs’ was broadcast on national TV. Allen Ginsberg, who was there with Jean Genet and William Burroughs, wrote about it. These chaotic and repressive events led to the trial of the so-called Chicago 8 in 1969: a high-profile scapegoating of 8 people indicted for conspiring to incite riots – including Abbie Hoffmann, Tom Haydn, Bobby Seale – all of them were eventually acquitted.

Nothing remained of this huge complex in 2003: just bare earth, some blue and white wild flowers, some footprints in the dried mud: an empty space. It had been bulldozed in the 1990s after playing host to its final events: a Mexican rodeo, and a Halloween season of the ‘world’s largest haunted house’. Now it was just a still point in the turning world: a place of erasure, disappearance, absence – although perhaps its emptiness still contained holes in time-space, after-images, echoes, if one only had the eyes to see and the ears to hear …

On the way back towards the train station to go back to the city, I stopped in a café for a bacon sandwich, a kind of small perverse thank you to all of those pigs. Outside on the wall, a sign which read: ‘the world’s best chili, beef ground daily on premises’. Inside, an old guy called Lou, wearing a rather battered Stetson, was doing animal impressions for the waitress. He would make a noise, and then there’d be a pause while she thought about what it might be. After one particularly mysterious sound from Lou, she thought long and hard, and then finally said: ‘Is it a zebra?’

*****

My materials today are also in 11 parts: ‘11 songs’. But whereas the Chicago material was about layered temporal strata within one place, and the connections their contiguity seemed to enable, today I’m proposing to hover around a particular moment in time as a mechanism to invite a fleeting gathering of other places, people, events occurring at that same time. So, a spatial drift within a precise temporal frame.

The time is early June 1957, when I was born into a nuclear family in the southern part of central Africa, with scar tissue on my lungs from intra-uterine foetal TB.

In large part the materials I’ve assembled today – including almost all of the images projected behind me - spill out of a copy of LIFE magazine that I found in Chicago in 2003; it’s the edition from the week of my birth. The lead stories concern misgivings about the safety of nuclear tests in the Nevada desert; and the joys of big game hunting in Africa. Elsewhere, and at exactly the same time, in San Francisco Shigeyoshi Murao and Laurence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books were arrested and charged with obscenity for the distribution of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl - and in Hollywood, at MGM studios, Elvis Presley was shooting Jailhouse Rock. Along with Gillian Welch, and some fragments from her album Time: The Revelator, these are my coordinates and companions on this associational drift. Oh, and my mother …

When I was a kid, I remember two cards my mother had tucked into the corner of her mirror in her bedroom: one was of a young Elvis Presley, from the late 1950s; the other was of George Best, looking like a Beatle. Her name was Brenda. Just before she died in England, I sent her a card from Australia with a Glen Baxter cartoon of a man in a pith helmet sprinting away from a towering volcanic eruption & ducking for cover from the cloud of debris. The caption read - ‘I’ll never forget the first time I met Brenda’. After she died I found it propped up in front of her mirror, between two ivory pigs.

This is for Brenda.

1. I want to sing that rock and roll

I want to sing that rock and roll,

I want to 'lectrify my soul,
'Cause everybody been making a shout
So big and loud, been drowning me out.
I want to sing that rock and roll.

I want to reach that glory land.
I want to shake my savior's hand,
And I want to sing that rock and roll.
I want to 'lectrify my soul,
'Cause everybody been making a shout
So big and loud, been drowning me out.
I want to sing that rock and roll.

I been a-traveling near and far,
But I want to lay down my old guitar,
And I want to sing that rock and roll.
I want to 'lectrify my soul,
'Cause everybody been making a shout
So big and loud, been drowning me out.
I want to sing that rock and roll.

I want to sing that rock and roll.

2. Plumbbob / Priscilla

Operation Plumbbob was a series of 24 nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site between late May and early October 1957. They included effects tests on military and civilian structures, radiation and bio-medical studies – with bombs placed on tall towers, suspended from high-altitude balloons, and the first ever underground test. One test involved the largest troop manoeuvre ever associated with US nuclear testing: 18,000 military personnel. Another – Hood, on 5 July – was at 74 kt the largest ever atmospheric test in the continental US – 5 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The flash of this thermonuclear device was seen by an airline pilot flying over Hawaii, over 800 miles away.

The radioactive fallout from the Plumbbob tests drifted widely, as far as Oregon and New England.

Priscilla, a 37 kiloton bomb exploded on June 24^th 1957,was the fifth in the Plumbbob series. Near Ground Zero at Frenchman Flat were 719 live pigs dressed in specially tailored military uniforms to test the fabrics’ abilities to protect against thermal radiation. Other pigs were placed in pens at varying distances from the epicenter behind large sheets of glass to test the effects of flying debris on ‘living targets’; they were harnessed in such a way as to force them to meet the blast face first, and their eyes were taped open. The explosion was bigger than expected …

Slightly further away were soldiers in trenches, one of whom, Marine Lieutenant Thomas Saffer, wrote a first-hand account: ‘A thunderous rumble like the sound of thousands of stampeding cattle passed directly overhead, pounding the trench line. Accompanying the roar was an intense pressure that pushed me downward. The shock wave was traveling at nearly 400 miles per hour, pushed toward us by the immense energy of the explosion. Overcome by fear, I opened my eyes. I saw that I was being showered with dust, dirt, rocks and debris so thick that I could not see 4 feet in front of me … A light many times brighter than the sun penetrated the thick dust, and I imagined that some evil force was attempting to swallow my body and soul … ”.

The blast shattered windows at the control point 14 miles away, and blew swinging doors from their hinges. The mushroom cloud rose quickly to more than 40,000 feet.

I was less than 3 weeks old.

3. A little hoarse

A few weeks earlier, on the second day of shooting Jailhouse Rock, 22-year old Elvis Presley was working on Alex Romero’s prison cell dance sequence. He threw himself into it with such abandon that he swallowed one of the temporary caps for his teeth as he was sliding down a pole. Elvis told the assistant director that he thought he could feel something rattling around in his chest. A doctor was called, but he told Elvis it was all in his imagination; he was fine. Everyone scrabbled around on the floor looking for the cap, but with no success. An hour or so later, Elvis said, ‘You know that scratch that I think I feel. It’s moved. It’s over to the left now’. ‘No, no, it’s all in your mind’. ‘It’s in my mind, is it? Listen to this’. He breathed out and you could hear a whistling sound.

It turned out that Elvis had aspirated the cap, which had lodged in his lung. The next day a surgeon removed it. ’We got it’, he said, ‘we just had to – we had to part the vocal chords and put the tool through and get in the lung. Then the damn thing broke in two, and we had to get one piece out, and then … the other’.

Elvis was a little hoarse for a couple of days.

4. Sea-journey on the highway (Howl)

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night […]

back yard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront borough of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on Benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo […]

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox […]

aaah, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time […]

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

5. Just in case

The Japanese-American photographer George Yoshitake was one of a number of civilian photographers employed by the military to document the nuclear tests in Nevada, and later in the South Pacific. In a New York Times interview earlier this year, George (now 82, and one of the few test site photographers still alive) remembers: ‘In Nevada we were maybe 5 or 6 miles away, and we could see the shock waves rolling across the valley floor, the dust being kicked up. We were prepared for the blast when it came, and we could feel its heat when it came about 10 or 15 seconds afterwards. At that time I thought it was only a job and I really didn’t give it much thought’.

'One afternoon I was at Lookout Mountain right here in Hollywood, and I got a call from a Woody Mark. He said: `George, I need you out here tomorrow for a special test'. I got there that night and he said: `Tomorrow morning you're going to go out with five other guys and you're going to be standing at ground zero'. I said, `Ground zero?' He said. `Yeah, but the bomb's gonna go off 10,000 feet above you.' I said, `Well, what kind of protective gear am I going to have?' He said, `None'.

'I remember I had a baseball hat, so I wore that just in case'.

6. Elvis Presley Blues

I was thinking that night about Elvis

Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis

Day that he died, day that he died

Just a country boy that combed his hair
He put on a shirt his mother made and he went on the air

And he shook it like a chorus girl
He shook it like a Harlem queen
He shook it like a midnight rambler, baby,
Like you never seen / Like you never seen / Never seen

I was thinking that night about Elvis

Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis

Day that he died, day that he died
How he took it all out of black and white
Grabbed his wand in the other hand and he held on tight

And he shook it like a hurricane
He shook it like to make it break
He shook it like a holy roller, baby
With his soul at stake / With his soul at stake

When he shook it and he rang like silver
He shook it and he shine like gold

He shook it and he beat that steam drill, baby
Well bless my soul, what's a-wrong with me?

I’m itching like a man on a fuzzy tree, on a fuzzy tree – fuzzy tree

7. ‘Language & themes’

The American Library Association reports that, over the last 20 years or so, the themes in books that are most likely to arouse the greatest number of complaints are – in descending order – sexual explicitness, offensive language, occultism and Satanism, promotion of homosexuality, violence, anti-family values, and subject matter offensive to religion.

Titles that recur at the head of the list of so-called ‘dangerous’ books are: Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut (promoting deviant sexual behaviour, sexually explicit); Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger (sexual references, undermines morality); John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (vulgar language), and Of Mice & Men (filth); Harry Potter by JK Rowling (anti-Christian Satanism); I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (language & themes); Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (language).

Two classics that have made recent lists are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (lewdness), and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (teaching alternative lifestyles).

8. Open secret

The Sheahans were just one of the families unwittingly caught up in the Nevada nuclear tests. They’d been mining silver at Groom Range since the 1890s, in an area the military conceived of as ‘largely unpopulated’. In the early 1950s, they had a visit from a ‘polite’ man from the Atomic Energy Commission who told them that there would be some testing at nearby Yucca Flats. The Sheahans had just built a new hundred thousand dollar mill.

One night before dawn their house shook, the front door burst open, and several windows shattered.

Some months into the tests, some AEC men arrived to tell the Sheahans there may be some danger from radioactive fallout; they left monitoring equipment for the family to take samples after the blasts. The clouds kept coming, like rainstorms sweeping over the valley, except that dust rather than water fell. The Sheahans began to see cattle with silver-dollar-sized white spots on their backs, found dead animals with the same white spots, and noticed wildlife becoming scarcer.

On one occasion Dan Sheahan encountered a herd of wild horses that had wandered on to his land, with their eyes burnt out, empty sockets left by a blast.

A year later, the airforce began strafing the Sheahan property with planes. Then one day, during lunch, a high-explosive incendiary bomb hit the mill and blew it up.

After Dan and Martha Sheahan both died of cancer, their sons continued to try to work the mine until 1984, when the land was suddenly declared off-limits for ‘national security reasons’. 89,000 acres of Nevada public land – 144 square miles – was forcibly closed, creating a buffer zone: a zone of invisibility, insulating what is now Area 51, purportedly the site of so-called ‘Black Projects’. Formally, to this day, this area ‘doesn’t exist’ - it’s literally ’ob-scene’ / off-stage; although of course it’s an ‘open secret’, and it’s there for all to see on Google Earth …

9. Whichaway to turn

Someday my baby, when I am a man,
and others have taught me the best that they can
they'll sell me a suit, they’ll cut off my hair
And send me to work in tall buildings

Meanwhile, over at the MGM studios in Hollywood in early June 1957, Elvis was being interviewed by a journalist during a break in filming.

In the first few weeks in LA he’d met Glenn Ford, John Ford, Yul Brynner, Kim Novak, and Robert Mitchum. One evening in Elvis’s penthouse apartment at the Beverley Wilshere, Sammy Davis Jnr. had scared the hell out of Elvis with his impression of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

So it's goodbye to the sunshine, goodbye to the dew

goodbye to the flowers, and goodbye to you
I'm off to the subway, I must not be late
I’m going to work in tall buildings

At MGM Elvis had been given Clark Gable’s dressing rooms; and while he talked to the columnist, Joe Hyams, he ate his lunch. A bowl of gravy, a bowl of mashed potatoes, nine slices of well-done bacon, two pints of milk, a large glass of tomato juice, a lettuce salad, six slices of bread, and four pats of butter.

When I’m retired, my life is my own
I made all the payments, it's time to go home
and wonder what happened betwixt and between

when I went to work in tall buildings

'I don’t feel like I’m property’, Elvis told Hyams. ‘I can’t get it into my head that I’m property. People tell me you can’t do this or that, but I don’t listen to them. Ain’t nobody can tell you how to run your life. I do what I want. I can’t change, and I won’t change … If I had to drop it all I could, but I wouldn’t like it … I get lonely as hell sometimes. A lot of times I feel miserable - don’t know whichaway to turn …’

So it's goodbye to the sunshine, goodbye to the dew
goodbye to the flowers, and goodbye to you
I'm off to the subway, I must not be late
I’m going to work in tall buildings

10. Visitations

In the night, the door to my room swings open oh so slowly and in comes my mother, looking elegant and much younger than she was when she died over 20 years ago. She is pretending to be a ghost. She creeps towards me playing the game of spooking her kid. She jumps on top of me on the bed, making ridiculous theatrical ghoul noises, oohs and aahs, and we wrestle. For a moment, I'm genuinely frightened and try to bite her, my heart pumping. After a moment, we pause. My head comes up from under the covers, our eyes meet, and I realise it's a game.

'Hello love', she says, sitting up, smiling. 'I'm a ghost'.

When I wake up in the morning, the door is still open ...

A few nights later, we’re creeping alongside a wall at night, hand in hand, in silence. We don't want to be caught, and are walking quietly but freely on the grass. The wall goes on and on. We keep going where we are going. Then a small warm animal noise in the darkness in front of us: horse breath. We stop.

To one side - the direction we are heading - a group of horsemen are gathering quietly: they look like hussars in uniform, their swords are drawn, the horses' flanks catch the low light. The brief flare of a brass cuirasse, the glint of an eye. The horses paw the ground.

Then to the other side - the direction from which we've come - other horsemen walk slowly into the half-light, like actors quietly taking their place on the stage, their swords also at the ready. Gradually the numbers grow until all are present.

A silent stand-off, as the horses fidget; tiny sounds of metal, bits and blade. The calm before some sort of storm in this field of intersecting gazes.We are caught in the middle, looking one way then the other. The confrontation is nothing to do with us, but we have no choice but to be there as it unfolds around us. Witnesses.

We wait. No one makes a move.

11. Silver vision (I dream a highway back to you)

I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight
Any second now I'm gonna turn myself on
In the blue display of the cool cathode ray
I dream a highway back to you.

Hang overhead from all directions
Radiation from the porcelain light
Blind and blistered by the morning white
I dream a highway back to you.

Sunday morning at the diner
Hollywood trembles on the verge of tears
I watched the waitress for a thousand years
Saw a wheel within a wheel, heard a call within a call
I dreamed a highway back to you.

Step into the light, poor Lazarus
Don't lie alone behind the window shade
Let me see the mark death made
I dream a highway back to you.
What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last year’s lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow
A silver vision come molest my soul
I dream a highway back to you.

Goodnight. Thank you for coming.

Material drawn from Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams; Peter Guralnick’s biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis; from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl; Peter Kuran’s How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb; Bill Morgan & Nancy J Peters (eds), Howl on Trial; Upton Sinclair's The Jungle; Catherine Caufield, Multiple Exposures; Gillian Welch’s Time: The Revelator, and her version of John Hartford’s ‘In Tall Buildings’.

Images from Life magazine, June 1957, and elsewhere.

Big thanks to Sue for singing with me ...

A version of these texts was first presented as a solo performance-presentation as part of 'The Doers, The Dreamers, The Drifters' at Islington Mills, Salford, on 6 November 2010. The festival was curated by Swen Steinhauser and Laura Mansfield, and supported by ACE, Salford University and Islington Mills. For further details, see here

Later versions of these materials were also presented at an AHRC network symposium 'Representing Environmental Change', The Anatomy Theatre, King's College London (May 2011); and as part of the PSi cluster symposium 'Encounters in Synchronous Time' at Bios in Athens, Greece (November 2011)

a new fire (unknown fields)

'The sun. The desert. The sky. The silence. The flat stones. The insects. The wind and the clouds. The moon. The stars. The west and east. The song, the colour, the smell of the earth. Blast area. Fire area. Body-burn area'

(Don DeLillo, End Zone)

Am just back from a wonderfully provocative and engaging day-long symposium at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, London: 'Unknown Fields: from the Atomic to the Cosmic' - an open forum prelude to an adventurous 'nomadic design studio' field trip for architecture students and others, taking them from the Chernobyl exclusion zone and Pripyat to the Baikonur Cosmodrome and on to the Aral Sea. The fourth in a series of annual expeditions organised by Liam Young & Kate Davies (as Unknown Fields), this year's journey marks the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight and the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Earlier Unknown Fields 'trajectories' involved field trips to the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Galapagos Islands (2008), the Arctic Circle (2009), and the West Australian outback (2010).

The symposium, shoe-horned uncomfortably and bum-numbingly into the Architectural Association's tiny library, brought together an intriguing group of presenters - artists, writers, film makers - to discuss the legacies of technologies' past optimisms, cultural manifestations of the possibilities and fears around nuclear power and space travel, and some of the emerging scenarios in our collective environmental and political future(s) and imaginings.

Leading off in the 'Atomic' section of the symposium, the Oxford-based environmental anthropologist Peter Wynn-Kirby described Japan's evolving cultural relations with nuclear power - the continuing paradox of fear and need - with reference to Godzilla movies and other stagings of post-war nuclear trauma, performative workings-through of what Susan Sontag called 'imagination of disaster' (in a 1965 essay in which she explains fantasy functionally as a process of 'inurement'). Wynn-Kirby touched on the horrifying story of the Japanese tuna trawler the Lucky Dragon no. 5, unwittingly caught in a blizzard of radioactive ash in March 1954 after the vast 'Bravo' thermonuclear test by the American military in the Pacific near Bikini atoll in early 1954, and the radioactive trail they took back to port in their contaminated catch, boat and blistered bodies. He also provided invaluable contexts for contemporary reworkings of anxiety in the wake of the Tohoku/Fukushima disaster via accounts of the fear induced by radiation's uncanny invisibility, default governmental and industry denials and cover-ups, the discourse of nuclear power as 'clean and green', the problems of waste disposal (Zonabend's 'filth everlasting', Hall's 'ultimate litter') in the light of most people's 'forward time horizon' of approximately 100 years, rather than the thousands of generations that constitute a nuclear half-life. After tracking the volume and trajectories of trans-national flows of nuclear waste, he offered a terrifying listing of disposal and dispersal strategies for such waste adopted or proposed thus far, including sea dumping/ejection into space, dumping on the Antarctic ice sheet, insertion into tectonic plates, embedding in 'inert silt' at the bottom of the Pacific, and long-term 'containment' in repositories such as Yucca Mountain in the USA.

The poet Mario Petrucci, author of the brilliant act of re-membering Chernobyl, Heavy Water, presented an intellectually energised paper entitled 'Chernobyl and the stories of knowledge', touching on e.g. denial as a synergy of four factors or 'pests' - the 'destructive meme', 'radical inertia' (deeply ingrained resistance to change, adapted and modified from Ivan Illich), the 'framed question' (with an agenda, assuming only certain possible 'answers'), and 'unaccounted positive feedback' (the nuclear industry as an accelerant on resource requirements); art as transformation with the potential to dent radical inertia, shed light on unaccounted positive feedback, create 'meme-proof' experiences (irreducible to single meanings, thriving on ambiguity) - art as something that might help us 'bear it' and 're-boot consciousness'.

As well as a critique of short-termism and free-market economics, Petrucci was exploring how artists might 'understand' Chernobyl in all of its actively destructive psychic gravity; he posited a model of knowledge as qualitative, engaging intellect, imagination and a responsibility to bear witness (to re-member, so that those who have been 'exposed to the invisible should never become so'). If both art and science contain 'alertness nutrients' and 'psychic nutrients', he suggested, we might approach them with the quality of attention Levertov demanded: 'poets must give us imagination of peace to oust imagination of disaster'. He quoted the Australian poet Les Murray: 'Only poetry recognises and maintains the centrality of absolutely everywhere'. Petrucci's final words were a request to us to expand skepticism to include skepticism towards our own doubts, and a loop back to a quote from David Bohm he had cited earlier: 'Studying the distractions is part of the process'.

Next up was the film maker Michael Madsen, whose recent documentary Into Eternity focuses on the Onkolo Nuclear Waste Repository in Finland. Madsen provided contexts for his remarkable film about Onkolo (which means 'hiding place'): as a self-monitoring construction design to contain some of Finland's nuclear waste, intended to last for up to 100,000 years, and thus 'possibly the first post-human structure' (a quotation from a critic's review of his film); the finite life-span of our own civilisation, and the impossibility of imagining that far into the future (and therefore of acting wholly responsibly). Madsen went on to offer a swift history of radiation since the 1880s, with 'knowledge' at every point assumed to be 'complete' before new unforeseen elements were discovered to destabilise the parameters of the known. Before showing the trailer to his film, with its bewildering account of this peculiar subterranean 'afterworld', he talked of nuclear waste as 'a new kind of fire', the first humans have encountered in our species' history that is inextinguishable (quoting the nuclear physicist Dr Hans Bethe?); and of the emergence of a 'nuclear priesthood', 'protectors' who 'know' and act on our behalf.

Will Wiles, author of Care for Wooden Floors and a forthcoming book Toxic Tourism, explored our culture's fascination with such places as Chernobyl, Pripyat, Baikonur and the Aral Sea, referencing Christopher Woodward's In Ruins and Brian Dillon's notion of 'ruin lust', from the Romantics' sublime apocalyptism to a post-industrial return to the monumentality of ruins in the work of, for example, Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark - Spiral Jetty as a 'dialectical ruin' projected into the future in deep geological time. Wiles alluded to Virilio's Bunker Archaeology (with its analysis of 'aberrant monuments' reflecting a loss of faith in modernism), the Mir Space Station ('ruins of the future', the discarded waste products of civilisations and ideologies), the work of Jane & Louise Wilson, and the wave of urban explorers and art photographers (e.g. Christopher Payne's abandoned asylums). Discarded systems and technologies, and a sense of loss at their passing, with an attendant appraisal of current systems: the rust belt, old mental health infrastructures, and the grander ruin of Soviet civilisation (with its grand project of 'taming nature' - and class), with Pripyat as 'the Vatican of ruins'. If (Soviet) modernism's sense of control - its huge-scale interventions 'to make the world a better place' - was now lost, then an outline of the post-human seems to inhabit the devastated ruins of control.

After a short and frankly borderline bonkers presentation by Oliver Goodhall ('Nuclear is good'), an anomalous pro-nuclear presence in this company who looked so far out of his depth that for much of his presentation I, and others, took it to be a not-very-good parody by a rabbit caught in the headlights (was this an adventurous, dialogic choice in terms of the event's curation, or a ludicrous misfire? hard to tell, although Oliver wasn't really up to the task of a genuinely provocative counter-discursive intervention in the context), it was on to the extraordinary Swiss scientific illustrator and activist artist Cornelia Hesse-Honneger, one of the core reasons (along with Petrucci, Madsen and Louise K. Wilson) for my presence at the symposium on this first day of my annual leave.

For many years, Hesse-Honneger has been making detailed taxonomic drawings and paintings of mutated insects, their deformities the result of exposure to mutogenic chemicals, in particular low-level radiation. As well as detailing the ways in which true bugs (her 'favorite' bio-indicators) and other insects have been 'disturbed' - deformed feelers, wings, eyes etc. - she mapped the evolution of her own work before and after Chernobyl, and in particular her systematic projects around nuclear power stations in Sweden, the Swiss Alps, France, the Ukraine, the UK etc. These ongoing studies focus on the gathering of quantitative data and the production of qualitative material in her exquisite paintings of insects and plants in those areas where the weather trajectories down-wind of nuclear power stations and reprocessing plants overlap.

In 1990, she spent just 10 minutes in Pripyat, in a silence without birds, with only the music from loudspeakers.

Hesse-Honneger was at pains to differentiate between the toxicity of low doses of 'artificial' (man-made) radiation and 'natural' radiation (e.g. in the granite-rich geologies of South-West England or the Alps), and to point out the degree to which the 300,000 + publications by independent scientists about the harmful effects of low-level radiation from Chernobyl have been systematically devalued and ignored by state- and industry-sanctioned scientists, and the funding of those researchers rendered 'difficult'. Ultimately she brought her presentation to a close with a series of wholly alarming images of facial deformities in Iraqi children, the victims of the obscenity of depleted uranium weaponry, and a forceful account of the degree of such contamination (and resultant deformities) in Afghanistan and areas of the former Yugoslavia, as well as in uranium mining communities in Africa, Australia and the USA. Nuclear waste, she suggested, was now dispersed and located within human beings, to calamitous effect.

The 'Cosmic' section of the symposium felt significantly curtailed, an after-thought in the shape and weight of the day; a number of advertised speakers weren't able to attend (artist Alicia Framis, designer Regina Pledszus, 'experience designer' Nelly Ben Hayoun), and the looser-than-loose managing and chairing of earlier sessions meant that the day was hours behind schedule, time was running out on the room, the energies of those attending were flagging, etc. The critical mass and gravity of the 'Atomic' presentations created a kind of imbalance overall, and we never really made it off the ground in this second part.

Nonetheless there were three engaging contributions, beginning with a short and quietly enthusiastic presentation by comic illustrator and animator Paul Duffield, reflecting on the impact of Carl Sagan's series Cosmos and continuing SETI research on his approach to visual storytelling, in particular in his visual poem Signal. Then on to Mark Pilkington, 'UFO folklorist', curator, editor of Strange Attractor, occasional contributor to the Fortean Times, and musician, who sprinted through some of the core ground of his stimulating and often hilarious road trip book Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs. From the development of covert military technologies during the Cold War, via Kenneth Arnold's sightings of UFOs in 1947, and an increasing number of flying saucer stories and films (including The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951), to a perceived intelligence and security problem, the classified RAND document of 1950 entitled 'The exploitation of superstitions for the purposes of psychological warfare', the CIA's increasing involvement, and the planting of stories in the media triggered by the RAND proposals (e.g. the April 1952 issue of Life magazine with its cover shot of Marilyn Monroe and the title 'There is a case for interplanetary saucers'). A heady and hugely entertaining cocktail of institutional paranoia and psy-ops disinformation strategies, 'black' military technologies research, conspiracy theories, ufologists and popular culture forms. One sensed he could have gone on for days.

Finally, the British artist Louise K. Wilson offered a brief introduction to aspects of her own work; sensitive to the fatigued overload of her audience, Louise cut her presentation short while still managing to cover a lot of ground and articulate a number of generative ideas. The notion of an artist's 'passport of admission' to sites, many of them contested or largely inaccessible; Kim Sawchuck's notion of 'bio-tourism', trajectories into internal spaces through e.g. MR scans and dream registers; Virilio's 'museum of accidents', and the body's own flaws and faultlines; Steve Goodman's 'sonic warfare' and 'the politics of frequency'; 'auralisation', as a sonic equivalent to visualisation; the stimulus provided by Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard's Four Rooms CD (2006), recorded in abandoned social spaces in and around Pripyat - a swimming pool, a church, a theatre auditorium, a gymnasium - using a version of Alvin Lucier's mirroring acoustic techniques to explore these spaces' psycho-acoustic qualities, the spectral traces of inaudible and invisible dangers.

Louise described her approach to locations via something akin to auscultation: an attentive and patient listening in to an architectural body, a documenting of the specific acoustic signatures of ruins, a gathering of reverberant 'impulse responses' often from derelict Cold War sites: a decommissioned Cumbrian missile site, Orford Ness and the National Trust's 'continued ruination' policy, Woomera and Nurrungar in South Australia, Aldermaston.

As we left, almost 3 hours after the scheduled ending of the symposium, Louise was setting up a contact microphone workshop for the Unknown Fields trajectory travelers, who were leaving the following morning; she played some recordings of limpets moving in hyper slo-mo on a rock, liquid and percussive sounds like the accelerated machinic groans and cracks of icebergs - them limpits are sure as hell busy. Cornelia Hesse-Honneger stood up to formally warn the travelers that Chernobyl still posed very real risks to health, and that they should take every precaution - air filter masks, clothes and shoes to be abandoned on emerging from the site, etc.: 'Don't touch anything'. Liam Young and Kate Davies smiled, said it's fine, every person will have full kit, a protective body suit, a face mask, gloves, we're on top of it, it's all fine. On my way out, in the doorway one of the students was asking Hesse-Honneger for some final advice: 'So do you think it's possible to take samples from the Chernobyl site? I'd very much like to'.

Text written in July 2011

shuttle 21: (in place of an) ending

'It's interesting to think of the great blaze of heaven that we winnow down to animal shapes and kitchen tools' (Don DeLillo, Underworld, London: Picador, 1998, 82) 
__________________________

Jean Baudrillard: - 'I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and enucleated universe, a universe which is virtually our own ...

I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe of the social in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the straited spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of slowness that shows itself in erosion and geology. I even looked for it in the verticality of the great cities ...

Here in the transversality of the desert and the irony of geology, the transpolitical finds its generic, mental space. The inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world immediately finds its aesthetic form here, its ecstatic form. For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.

The grandeur of the deserts derives from their being, in their aridity, the negative of the earth's surface and of our civilised humours.  They are places where humours and fluids become rarefied, where the air is so pure that the influence of the stars descends direct from the constellations. And, with the extermination of the desert Indians, an even earlier stage than that of anthropology became visible: a mineralogy, a geology, a sidereality, an inhuman facticity, an aridity that drives out the artificial scruples of culture, a silence that exists nowhere else.

The silence of the desert is a visual thing, too. A product of the gaze that stares out and finds nothing to reflect it. There can be no silence up in the mountains, since their very contours roar. And for there to be silence, time itself has to attain a sort of horizontality; there has to be no echo of time in the future, but simply a sliding of geological strata one upon the other giving out nothing more than a fossil murmur.

Desert: luminous, fossilised network of an inhuman intelligence, of a radical indifference - the indifference not merely of the sky, but of the geological undulations, where the metaphysical passions of space and time alone crystallise. Here the terms of desire are turned upside down each day, and night annihilates them. But wait for the dawn to rise, with the awakening of the fossil sounds, the animal silence ...

The form that dominates the American West, and doubtless all of American culture, is a seismic form: a fractal, interstitial culture, born of a rift with the Old World, a tactile, fragile, mobile, superficial culture - you have to follow its own rules to grasp how it works: seismic shifting, soft technologies.

The only question in this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance? A theoretical question here materialised in the objective conditions of a journey which is no longer a journey and therefore carries with it a fundamental rule: aim for the point of no return. This is the key. And the crucial moment is that brutal instant which reveals that the journey has no end, that there is no longer any reason for it to come to an end.

Beyond a certain point, it is movement itself that changes. Movement which moves through space of its own volition changes into an absorption by space itself - end of resistance, end of the scene of the journey as such (exactly as the jet engine is no longer an energy of space-penetration, but propels itself by creating a vacuum in front of it that sucks it forward, instead of supporting itself, as in the traditional model, upon the air's resistance). In this way, the centrifugal, eccentric point is reached where the movement produces the vacuum that sucks you in.

This moment of vertigo is also the moment of potential collapse. Not so much from the tiredness generated by the distance and the heat, as from the ireversible advance into the desert of time'.

Extract from Jean Baudrillard, America, London: Verso, 1988, 5-6, 11
__________________________

Hello Mick, and Beth,

I'm ending with Baudrillard, not because I necessarily agree with everything he proposes, but because his rhetorical postcards from the road remain provocative for me in terms of driving, the cinematic, the seismic drama of geology, time, 'silence'.

In assembling these virtual fragments over the past three weeks, a kind of ad hoc - and unfinishable - reading companion for your journey, I have often tried to imagine where you are. And I realise I've entirely elided my own embodied movements during that time, a shuttle rhythm of to-ing and fro-ing between work in London and England's (much milder, greener) 'Southwest'.

I have passed Stonehenge six times in different light, and on each occasion have hollered greetings to the pigs on the other side of the road. I've been dazzled by a billowing field of scarlet poppies in bloom. I've watched tiny swallows being fed by their hyperactive parents in their mud-spit nest above a doorway, and cried quietly during episodes of 24 Hours in A&E. And, in the gaps, I've been transfixed by events in Egypt, as well as by the river, the swifts, the bees, the clouds and the sky.

Wishes, to you and the shuttle crew,
 for the journeys home and to come, 
elsew/here ...

Photos: Richard Misrach, drive-in cinema, Las Vegas, 1987; (bottom) William Egglestone

Unhurried departure music: Jem Finer's Longplayer - time lapse film of a live performance at the Roundhouse, London, 12.9.2009 (1,000 minutes in 1,000 seconds). For the Longplayer website, and a live stream link to this ongoing musical composition (currently 13.5 years into its 1,000 year duration), see here