>>Fundamentally this project is about legibility, you can’t sense radiation, but what if we could visualize that? The visualization scheme and the glasses are about trying to shift the perception beyond the visual spectrum. To see things, that exist, that effect very fundamentally the creation of architecture and denotation of space and have the ability to become legible. [DG]>>maybe you could deal with the issue of death, you say cancer, not that cancer obviously equals death, you can treat cancer but in this context cancer equals a great big narrative of human life. So it’s very interesting.
[DF]>> What’s interesting to me is that this is the second or third of these throwback projects in some ways whereas the previous project was really about how do you deal with the issue of the deconstruction of the world whereas in your case it’s really interesting to me this kind of undercurrent of new wave like early eighties Devo, which is quite literally [expressed]. I mean playing Kraftwerk and all of that it’s very interesting the idea of mutation was very central and devolution and Mongoloids if you listen to the first album. Is that something you were consciously aware of? >>yes, [laughter]
[LC]>>I’m wondering, you said the difference between this and Chernobyl is it was buried, but you are in essence burying this too, but you are burying this visibly. So I think it’s powerful. I’m still not convinced there’s a clear concept of what inhabit means and how to get to that point but what I do like is it would have been really easy for you to get obsessed fully with the process because it’s intricate it has many steps and it has gadgets, but what I like is at least at some point you brought it to a conclusion without losing the fact that there is a process. So in as much as it is data driven or its research driven there’s evidence that if I could inhabit the site by being a tourist or a learner or whatever it is, I may not understand the process but I can see that there was one. And that there is a half-life and things like that, that there’s an aging process that I think is successful. And I’m just wondering what the inhabitation of that is?
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[DF]>>of course, but that was in repo man and that whole time had resigned to the fact that we are the Mongoloids and we are toxic in a sense and didn’t suggest solutions. To me this solution is actually quite conventional in a sense, that you are capping it. But it’s creating something that is permeable. To me there’s and interesting potential communication that could happen, when they encapsulate a lot of nuclear waste for example they’re using symbols. When you read the world without us there’s and account in that where you read about how to communicate with people in a thousand years. So had you considered in a sense [this communication]? >>So there is a fundamental distinction between that time scale on the order of thousands of years with the time scale that we are dealing with here, because the wastes that need to be remediated have a much shorter lifespan that what we would deal with in so-called ‘permanent solution’ (geologic isolation) hundreds of years vs. thousands of years. So the language of legibility is more machine readable here vs. more formalized like the landscape of spikes in The World Without Us or the proposals for Onkalu in Finland [as detailed in Into Eternity]