digital still, remote handled nuclear waste being transported on US Hwy 285, New Mexico. From Look Only at the Movement, smudge studio, 002012-15
LOOK ONLY AT THE MOVEMENT
two-channel HD video, 171 minutes, 002013
view 21:42 minute video preview on Vimeo
A potent tale has been set into motion across the American landscape. And it is only just beginning. Look Only at the Movement juxtaposes two entangled worlds as they unfold across one another: 1) the streaming American Highway system and 2) its travelers' punctuating encounters with nuclear waste transport, disposal cells and sites of remediation.
Look Only at the Movement offers a meditation-in-motion. It invites imaginings, curiosity, and logistical questions about how contemporary life, landscape, and infrastructure design will bend their realities around the need to contain and indefinitely move-with nuclear materiality—for all foreseeable futures.
Colorado rest stop with Tommy, from Look Only at the Movement, smudge studio, 002012-15
During fall, 002012, smudge studio embarked on a 12-day research trip. Our intention was to generate original documentation of storage infrastructures, engineered landscapes, and mobile infrastructures that facilitate the movement of nuclear materials along U.S. interstate highways. We documented not only these sites, but also their larger, environmental and topographical contexts. Our field research brought us in contact with mobile infrastructures and human beings who track and move-with these critical materials.
Sites visited include: EnergySolutions Clive Facility, UT; Moab Project, UT (a project of the Uranium Mill Tailings Remediation Act); Crescent Junction Disposal Site; Mexican Hat Uranium Disposal Cell, UT; Shiprock Uranium Disposal Cell, NM; Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, NM (our nation’s only deep geologic repository for transuranic nuclear waste) NM; Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM; Rocky Flats, CO (site of former plutonium plant); and Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, NY.
On September 25, we toured the Department of Energy's TRANSCOM field office in southern New Mexico. Staff at this high-security site monitor the movements of satellite-tracked trucks transporting TRU waste 24 hours a day from their sites of temporary “storage” to New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). At WIPP, nuclear materials are buried 1250 feet below the surface in a 250 million year old salt dome — where the aim is to isolate them from humans and the environment for the next 10,000 years. A radiological release in February 002014 suspended its operations.
The resulting digital video and photography constitute the "findings" of our field research. They expresses our intention to create accessible, material tracings of the realities associated with these facts:
the movement of nuclear waste through public spaces is (and will long continue to be) a condition of contemporary life, landscape, and infrastructure design, and yet,
citizens, architects, and engineers possess virtually no models for how to design and maintain infrastructures capable of safely containing nuclear materials for the millions of years required by their potency.
digital stills, from Look Only at the Movement, smudge studio, 002012-15
Look Only at the Movement became an exhibition relay among four venues between Fall 002013 and Summer 002015. Each venue was located near historical and/or contemporary sites and routes that were part of the research and resulting film/photography. As the exhibition was relayed from venue to venue, it re-enacted the route of the research trip, traced the spatial scope and topographies documented in the work itself, and traversed paths that waste materials will continue to travel for foreseeable futures.
Venues included Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons the New School for Design, New York, NY (10.3.13-12.05.13); Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, NM (5.12.14-5.31.14); Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT (Summer/Fall 002014); Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV (4.11.15-7.26.15).
PRESS:
Places Journal September 002014
BOMB Magazine online May 002014
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Our focus on mobile infrastructures builds upon the 42-card deck that smudge studio released in June 002012: Repository: A Typological Guide to America's Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructure.
Repository, like other smudge projects, uses media to visualize or “signal” invisible forces (earth forces as well human forces) that shape natural and built environments with great consequence, but about which there is little cultural awareness. The speculative tools and aesthetic provocations that we make invite humans to recalibrate their senses of place and their imaginations in relation to forces of change that function and unfold at scales that can exceed human cognitive capacity to grasp and comprehend.
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Photography and video from Look Only at the Movement has been screened or exhibited at the following events:
Perpetual Uncertainty, Bildmuseet, Sweden, 002016
"The Geologic Imagination" Sonic Acts Festival, Amsterdam, February 002015
"Offical Office" Recess (NY) and STORE (Dresden), Spring 002015
"Sunday Salon," home of Katie Holten and Dillon Cohen, January 002015
"Radial Materialism: Making the World Matter" CUNY Graduate Center, The Center for Humanities, September 002014
“Artists Out of Context – Forays Into the World," Brooklyn Public LIbrary, Dialogues in the Visual Arts - An Artist Conversation Series, March 002014
The Anthropocene Project: An Opening, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, January 002013
Secret Wars, Proteus Gowanus, Brooklyn, NY, January 002013
Deep Time - No Time, Semmer Berlin, Berlin, Germany, February 002013
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Associated FOP posts:
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