I FELT IT MYSELF

"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 in Jon Else's The Day After Trinity

During the summer of 001959 Dyson wrote the following. He was describing a stretch of Nevada desert named Jackass Flat, soon to become part of the Nevada Test Site.

"It is a soul-shattering silence. You hold your breath and hear absolutely nothing. No rustling of leaves in the wind, no rumbling of distant traffic, no chatter of birds or insects or children. You are alone with God in that silence. There in that white, flat silence I began to feel a slight sense of shame for what we were proposing to do. Did we really intend to invade this silence with our trucks and bulldozers and after a few years leave it a radioactive junkyard?"

In the spring of 002009, I wrote to Freeman Dyson. He accepted my invitation to receive postcards from me as I traveled through the American West while visiting the Nevada Test Site (NTS) and five additional sites of anomalous nuclear tests/accidents in Nevada and New Mexico.

These postcards are a gesture of extension of connection between 001959 and 002009, and among the six sites. It is a performative response to what it was like for me to come to these sites as an artist and feel them for myself.

- Jamie Kruse, July 002009

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