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“We know when we build a bridge it will not last.” – representative from the Icelandic Road Administration, May 5, 2012
Icelandic glacier, image courtesy Janike Kampevold Larsen
We’ve just returned from Iceland, where we took part in the Landscape Journeys project sponsored by the Oslo School of Architecture’s Institute of Urbanism and Landscape and the Norwegian Research Council. The project’s mandate was to take up travel as methodological form and acknowledging the importance of developing research projects in response to landscapes—while actually moving through them. Fellow journeyers included Janike Larsen, Mason White, Luis Callejas, Peter Hemmersam, Alessandra Ponte, and Giambattista Zaccariotto. Our international contingent had an array of interests, including glaciers, geothermal energy, landscapes and the literary imagination, and “extreme” landscapes. FOP’s particular focus was on what we have come to call “streaming” landscapes of Iceland, and how the Icelandic landscape can be seen as a concatenation of events occurring along various speeds, intensities, and temporal trajectories.
image courtesy the Icelandic Road Administration
Before leaving Reykjavík, we had the opportunity to meet with a representative from the Icelandic Road Administration. He shared information with our group about the effects of glacial floods on the highway system in southern Iceland, with a focus on Iceland’s highway 1, also known as the ring road. This 832-mile stretch of two lane roads and one lane bridges opened in 1974. It is the life-line for inhabitants outside of the capital. He shared with us the map shown above, illustrating particular stretches of roadway in Iceland that are at risk of being washed away when volcanic eruptions occur and set the jökulhlaups, or glacial outburst floods, into motion. At one point in our conversation he stated that “there’s nothing you can do” in the face of some eruptions, and that “we wouldn’t design [the bridges] without considering all that can happen in nature.” For us, his words were a powerful demonstration of the design limits that must be accepted routinely and worked with in Iceland.
We learned that glacial outburst floods can arrive within hours, days, or even months after an eruption. After a series of strong earthquakes in 2000, bridge designs were upgraded to meet the force of 8.0 earthquakes. “Weak points” are designed into Icelandic roads that allow them to be washed away in small sections. This relieves the pressure on the remaining road and and bridges, often saving the bridges from being torn away by the massive floods. And, our representative told us, the Road Administration keeps a cache of 100-300 meters of “stock” bridge material on hand at all times, just in case.
After a day and a half in Reykjavík, we began our journey.
a one lane bridge along the ring road, FOP 2012
In many ways, it’s still the Pleistocene, or perhaps it’s more like the Cambrian, in Iceland. At 66° north, Iceland is in a northern latitude where the land should be covered with ice. But this island is in a state of constant thaw. One-third of Iceland’s 40,000 square miles is volcanically active. Massive glaciers, including one that is surpassed in size only by the polar icecaps, loom in the mountains, and daily life along the southern edge of the country is directly shaped by glacial materials washing, flooding, eroding, and falling from the sides of volcanos.
Icelandic outwash, FOP 2012
We were prepared to experience Icelandic roadways that are designed to be “responsive” to their surrounding forces. But we were surprised by the turbulence of the landscapes we encountered. Day after day we passed infrastructural and geological detritus from a jumble of previous glacial/volcanic events still playing out. At farm after farm, we saw workers driving large front-loaders, dredging outwash that sometimes stretched to the horizon. We quickly realized that volcanoes and glaciers directly inflect life here, even when no active, large-scale “event” is currently underway. From the viewpoint of road infrastructure, the last landscape event is still happening and the next is always approaching (on average, an eruption occurs in Iceland every 5 years).
mangled infrastructure left as a monument to the massive torrent of 1996 unleashed by Lake Grimsvotn, FOP 2012
a former road pylon stands alone in an outwash plain near Vík í Mýrdal, FOP 2012
washed out road to the left, new road to the right, FOP 2012
ongoing dredge project near Jökulsárlón, FOP 2012
About an hour outside of Reykjavík we stopped at Markarfljot. In July, 2010, a massive flood of glacier waters occurred here, melted by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. As thousands of Europeans found themselves immobilized by air traffic disruptions, some people in Iceland were dealing with the extraordinary outpouring of thick ash and water discharged by the volcano. According to the Roads Administration representative, as the Eyjafjallajökull eruption began, the Administration estimated it would take 90 minutes for the flood to reach the ring road in the Markarfljot area. A brave, local roads worker had been willing, and able, to activate his machinery and break a hole through the highway. This channelled the water towards the sea and away from cultivated fields, and took pressure off the bridge.. The bridge was spared, and despite the raging waters, only a small section of roadway had to be replaced.
travel map, FOP 2012
the Markarfljot crossing, FOP 2012
The last two days we were in Iceland, we were based out of Vík í Mýrdal. Vík is very special place, the southernmost village in Iceland with beautiful black basalt beaches. Vik is also notable for its proximity to Katla. Katla is the volcano that the president of Iceland has warned could “unleashed devastating consequences world-wide.” In Vík and the farm communities nearby, people practice periodic evacuation drills. By some forecasts, when Katla erupts again, Vík might no longer exist.
black basalt beach, FOP 2012
volcanic soil and ash in Vík, at the foot of the Mýrdalsjökull glacier, which has the Katla volcano embedded within it, FOP 2012
glacier tongue off Mýrdalsjökull, FOP 2012
While we were in Vík, no eruptions appeared imminent, but it was hard to deny the visceral sense of instability that accompanied our stay there. Looming near, Katla’s material presence ensures that one doesn’t easily forget its proximity—nor the reality that it is capable of massively rearranging Vík’s landscape at a scale we can barely imagine.
In 2004, a group of researchers spent time in Vík and in the nearby farming community of Álftaver. Citizens of these two communities were interviewed to determine their perception of risk and their preparedness for future eruptions. The findings were published in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences in 2010. Residents’ responses and senses of safety varied greatly, but several farmers commented that more is at risk today than during the last major eruption (1918) because of their dependence upon critical modern infrastructures such as electricity, utilities, and transportation:
“Our life is based on our land and I sometimes wonder what I will do if an eruption takes place and everything is taken away from me! Will it all be over?” Another farmer said, “what if the roads are blocked, no electricity, no phone connections, petrol and so on.”
The sense of precariousness that we experienced in Vík echoed those we had felt previously in Tokyo, where, according to some scientists, there is a 70% risk of a major earthquake before 2016. Both locations, and many others around the world, are in the midst of realizing the contemporary consequences of the ancient fact that when geologic streams collide with infrastructures, sometimes the human and the built will be massively out-scaled. A passage from Yasunari Kawabata’s 1954 novel, Sound of the Mountain, suggests that the medium for such realizations can be the streaming landscape itself:
“It was a windless night. The moon was near full … Shingo wondered if he might have heard the sound of the sea. But no—it was the mountain. It was like the wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth … The sound stopped, and he was suddenly afraid. A chill passed over him, as if he had been notified that death was approaching. He wanted to question himself, calmly and deliberately, to ask whether it had been the sound of the wind, the sound of the sea, or a sound in his ears. But he had heard no such sound, he was sure. He had heard the mountain.”
poster at Keflavik airport, FOP 2012
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stills documenting a Jökulhlaup (glacial outburst) in Iceland in 2010, via kadamatful on YouTube
On May 3-4, we’ll be at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) for a conference called Landscapes of Energy. We’re honored to be a part of this gathering. We’ll be sharing some evolving ideas and work in our presentation entitled “Streaming Landscapes.”
Contemporary life is a dynamic and teeming space of exchanges that involve the geologic—a constant negotiation of movement and materiality among humans, geologic forces and materials, and past and potential futures. Most recently, we’ve been making work that offers the following provocation: “What if anticipating geologic scales of force, change, and effect became a common design specification for energy production and distribution projects, policy-making, and infrastructure design?”
As our recent time in Japan has made clear to us—landscapes ARE energy–they are movement, they are composed not of inert things or objects, but of dynamic events. Doreen Massey’s work has inspired us to consider landscape to be a simultaneity of trajectories and unfinished stories. Not, as Massey points out, a simultaneity of a closed system, but a simultaneity of movement. A landscape is a product of connections being made and unmade. Its changes of state unfold continuously at wildly diverse speeds and scales, thanks to the flows of energy that compose it and that it becomes.
The planet is “streaming” as it always has. But it seems that humans are living this fact in new ways, as volcanic ash clouds thwart international travel, nuclear power plants disperse cesium around the globe, and debris slides erase portions of cities in minutes. How might we meet and engage the energy released by landscapes are in motion?
map of volcanic ash spreading across Europe from the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland, from Skynews.com, 2010
As a condition of contemporary life, the planet’s continuous state of flux seems to be taking on new meaning and consequence for human beings. Humans have intensified their reliance upon their ability to harness landscape streams and derive ever-increasing scales of energy from them. At some moments, our infrastructural projects and capacities—our abilities to divert, capture, and reconfigure landscape streams—seem to rival geologic forces in scale. But they don’t, really. And as our efforts become more intense, dense, and complex, more and more is at risk.
For our presentation in Oslo, we’ll be sharing some of our previous landscape-based research trips and projects, such as the Limit Case Postcards and Below the Line. We’ll also apply these projects to future interests, including our ongoing engagement with the cascade of consequences resulting from the Fukushima-Daiichi meltdowns. This ongoing event is a powerful reminder of how essential it is to address infrastructure as the arrangement of forces and things in relation to each other. And also in relation to the reality that there are a multitude of earth forces capable of rising up and challenging our best design and engineering capacities, which can mean the difference between mere accident and international catastrophe.
How might we design and respond to the contemporary conditions of life differently by taking ‘streaming landscape” as our point of departure?
After the conference, we’ll join the Landscape Journeys research project–an initiative of AHO’s Institute of Urbanism and Landscape and supported by The Norwegian Research Council. The research expedition will include traveling the ring road of Iceland and visiting present and future sites for hydro-electrical and geothermal energy.
The landscape of Iceland streams at a speed much greater than the landscapes that most of us live within. What takes millenia to form or come apart in other places happens much faster there. In Iceland, the meetings up of geologic force and human activity—two vastly different scales of events—are intensified, literalized, and encompassing. This is perhaps most exquisitely illustrated by the Jökulhlaup, a glacial outburst flood.
Some of Iceland’s infrastructure supports our efforts to think in terms of “streaming landscapes.” We hope to learn more about how Icelandic people acknowledge the streaming-ness of their landscapes through the ways they design and live with their infrastructures. We’re especially drawn to Icelandic examples of flexible, responsive infrastructure design. From here, it appears that geologic realities of Iceland could offer vital instruction about how we might imagine and design infrastructures capable of streaming in response to the earth forces that confront and challenge them. Some Icelandic highways and bridges are designed to bend, break, and hold only so long before giving way to the mega floods that result when volcanic explosions melt huge areas of glaciers in an instant. They could assist us in learning new ways to build and live responsively within the planet’s streaming landscapes.
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*Special thanks to Janike Kampevold-Larsen for her support and interest in our work.
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the Shirakawa (White River) in Kyoto, Japan, FOP 2012
There is a Chinese character rarely used today in modern Japanese: 隨. It has largely been replaced by a slightly simplified character composed of 12 strokes instead of 16. Both of these kanji are pronounced “zui.” Both can be found in words such as “zuihitsu,” which is described as a miscellaneous essay, literary jotting, or musing–a form this blog post is likely to take. While the modern, simplified version has acquired additional meanings over the years, it retains its old definition, which is the sole meaning of the out-of-date kanji: “at the mercy of (the waves).”
We’re about 20 days into our time in Japan, and despite having a very limited understanding the Japanese language, we sense that an appropriation of “zui’s” historical meaning offers us a way to begin to creatively respond, and make sense of our experiences here to-date.
Over the past three weeks we have sensed some of the literal and metaphorical waves that are shaping life in Japan, many of which were set in motion by events last March. These waves are affecting each other and in turn sending waves of change around the world. Human desire and technical capacity can direct and channel some of these waves, but not others.
Our Amulets for Infrastructure project is underway. But because of our time here, we are realizing more fully that infrastructure might best be understood as human attempts to concentrate, hold, channel and redirect powerful earth forces–as we try to negotiate the physical world. Some of our best attempts are more successful than others. The tsunami waves of last March breached critical infrastructure designs here in Japan, resulting in incalculable waves of feelings, waves of connection and disconnection among people, waves of political change—and the unleashing of invisible radioactive waves out from Fukushima Daiichi. Even if one can not see or feel these various waves, we sense that on the streets and in the homes of people living and working in Japan, a profound and quiet adaptation is taking place to how these waves are materially re-shaping daily life.
sign posted on the door to Cafe Kailash in Kyoto, graphic by nijino-tane
Last week we read March was Made of Yarn, a compilation of essays and poems that respond to the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. In the introduction, the editors encouraged readers to sense how experiences in Japan might lend insights to broad audiences:
“The idea for this project took gradual shape as we traveled among Tokyo, Tohoku, London and New York, watching from near and far as March 11 and its aftermath unfolded. A thought became a shared idea that was developed further as we shoveled debris into the back of trucks in Tohoku, as riots racked London, as storms struck the East Coast of the United States, as a heat wave hit Tokyo, as floods raged through Bangkok, even as the cleanup in northeastern Japan proceeded but radiation continued to leak. It has been that kind of year.”
Indeed, with The New York Times report this week that radioactive beef is quite possibly being sold and eaten by Americans (the result of cattle grazing on lands surrounding abandoned uranium mines in Arizona), the radioactive contamination currently affecting food supplies in Japan is hardly unique to this country. Fukushima is far from being the only source of radioactive contamination in food. We’ve all been at the mercy of such waves since some time around 1945.
Describing the rewritten, 2011 version of her 1993 essay (entitled God Bless You) that appears in March Was Made of Yarn, Hiromi Kawakami says:
“But let me return to the story of the god of uranium. Uranium-235 had been resting there in the ground, quietly dwindling away for billions of years. Had no human touched it, it would have gone on peacefully emitting its piddling quantities of radiation without any problems … Human beings, however, had another idea. They gathered bits of U-235 from wherever they lay, concentrated them, and then whipped them into action. ‘Split your atoms,’ they cried. ‘Give us light, give us heat, give us power. Work! Work!’ For nuclear bombs, they demanded that the power be released in great explosions; for nuclear power, in dribs and drabs … If the god of uranium really exists, then what must he be thinking? Were this a fairy tale of old, what would happen when humans break the laws of nature and turn gods into minions?’ … my purpose was to express my amazement at how our daily lives can go on uneventfully day after day and then suddenly be so dramatically changed by external events…”
After the March 11 disaster, the Japanese government raised the limits for acceptable amounts of cesium in the food supply. Recently, we saw a story on the NHK evening news (the national broadcaster of Japan). It explained that as of April 1st, these limits have been lowered significantly.
NHK evening news on April 5, 2012 showing lowered levels of cesium (measured in becquerels) now deemed acceptable in the Japanese food supply as of April 1st, FOP 2012
It’s cherry blossom season in Japan and there is a strong cultural tradition to celebrate both the appearance and disappearance of these tiny flowers. This sensibility, of acknowledging and contemplating perishability, runs deep in Japanese culture. We’ve been watching blossoms arrive slowly along a small river in Kyoto, the Shirakawa. The continuous streaming of water beneath the ephemeral blooms gives sensations, both celebratory and slightly melancholic, of the relentless change that permeates daily life here.
sakura blossoms, Kyoto, Japan, FOP 2012
As expected, our Amulets for Infrastructure project is changing purpose and meaning as we adapt it in ways we think might make better use of it in Japan. Our neighbors here in Kyoto have helped us to gain an expanded understanding of “infrastructure.” Some of the most important forms of civic and urban “infrastructure” are human-to-human networks of communication and daily gestures of social connection. Just down the street from where we are living, a community group is working to save one of Kyoto’s traditional forms of architecture, a machiya townhouse, from demolition. They have staged a pop-up tea house and cherry blossom viewing station in a vacant lot next to the machiya—an ephemeral aperture for cherry blossom viewing and tea drinking that also informs about the group’s efforts. Such human connections are among the most vital, urgent, and reliable of “infrastructures.” The fact that this group is forging human networks on behalf of an infrastructural remnant–the machiya– makes it especially relevant to the amulets for infrastructure project.
ephemeral outdoor tea house and machiya along the Shirakawa, Kyoto, FOP 2012
Kyoto infrastructure in action, cherry blossoms in background, FOP 2012
Yesterday we passed off our first amulet for infrastructure at Cafe Kailash. It’s one of the few cafes we have encountered that openly reports that it has tested its food for radiation. We offered an amulet to the owners of the cafe to acknowledge their effort, and the importance of human and technical infrastructures that support the world’s food supplies. They then told us that mothers from northern regions of Japan have brought their children to eat at this restaurant because they could trust that the food here was safer than in their home cities.
flyer posted in the bathroom at Cafe Kalish, FOP 2012
This week, we also shared the Amulets for Infrastructure project with a group of students in fashion design at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. The students will be making their own amulets for infrastructure and we look forward to documenting and sharing the results of this collaboration in the coming weeks.
Kyoto power lines, FOP 2012
Kamo River, Kyoto, FOP 2012
We encountered this stanza from J.D. McClatchy’s poem, entitled One Year Later, while reading March was Made of Yarn. It gave us one more reason to embrace the antiquated Chinese character 隨, (zui: at the mercy of the waves) and take it as inspiration:
Ministers, tell me
Why did you think that power
Would stay where it was?
Aging cores collapse
Under waves of a future
No one can live in.
The reactors stand there still.
What is left to warm or kill?
first round of Amulets for Infrastructure, image FOP 2012
Next week we head to Kyoto, Japan to kick off Amulets for Infrastructure. Over the last couple of weeks we fashioned our first series of paper amulets for the project (described further here).
For us, the Amulets for Infrastructure project is less about the idea of “luck” sometimes associated with the concept of amulets or talismans, and more a reminder of ancient knowledges that tell of the power of nonhuman forces to shape and sometimes unseat human plans, including human-built structures and infrastructures. With Amulets for infrastructure, we hope to help extend awareness that future infrastructures and built environments need to be designed and used with geologic earth forces in mind. This awareness is something that a number of people have said was “forgotten” in the design and building of infrastructures directly affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year. Nuclear power plants located at the edge of the ocean and enormous sea walls designed to deflect tsunamis gave false senses of security, and ultimately failed.
This project addresses the reality that complex and networked infrastructures of daily life put humans in relation to forces much larger than ourselves in fundamentally new ways. Through Amulets for Infrastructure we ask, “Together, how will we meet this new reality?”
Soon we’ll be distributing our paper amulets and inviting people in Japan (and elsewhere) to adapt and augment them. During the next month, we plan to document our invitations to collaborators in Japan to make their own Amulets for Infrastructure /インフラのお守り(infura no omamori).
The omamori we’ve created are about 4″ x 2″ and are the perfect size to hold a standard business card sized wish, photo, momento, or story inside. The amulets that we will distribute in Japan will have this card folded inside:
The project’s page on our website has a 5.5″ x 6.5″ omamori template that you can download and fold, origami style, into your own omamori envelope. You can watch this great DIY video to learn how to fold the origami “bar envelope” that we’ve used for ours. We are also inviting people to send us documentation of the omamori that they make, and stories about their relationship to the infrastructure they are addressing with their omamori.
While in Kyoto, we will engage with these realities with people who live in places relatively far from the Tōhoku region. Today, the behavior of an infrastructural grid or node in one place often has ramifications for entire regions, and sometimes the entire globe. Our intentions are that this project will also function practically. We hope it might contribute to efforts now being made to ensure that assumptions about infrastructures such as tsunami walls and power plants—assumptions that added to the suffering in Tōhoku and elsewhere—are questioned and redirected so that such suffering might be avoided or lessened in the future.
Words from the chairman of the Kyoto University of Art and Design from 1999 still ring true on the eve of our departure:
“I believe that the courage to embark on the grand experiment and adventure of resurrecting the human spirit-grounded in the ideas and wisdom of the East-together with the ongoing study and exploration of art and culture can lead humanity toward a future filled with hope. I hope that the drumbeat for a revival of the arts emanating from here in Kyoto will stir the spirit of Japan quietly but deeply, and I pledge to make this a new beginning.”
Shochoku Tokuyama
Chairman, Uryuyama Gakuen
October 27, 1999
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Between April 9-13th, we’ll be relaying work in progress from the Amulets for Infrastructure project to Sudbury, Canada. There, the Canadian collaborative Dodolab will be facilitating a sister project entitled Amulets for Sudbury project. Together, we hope the two projects will create a transcultural, transglobal exchange between people in Kyoto and people in Sudbury. Stay tuned to the FOP blog and our twitter feed (@geoturn) for project reports.
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“… in effect, these facilities are simply well-guarded parking lots for storage casks.”
Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future report, January 2012, page 39
dry casks at Surry Nuclear Power Plant, VA (the first dry cask installation in the United States opens here in 1986), image NRC
It’s quite likely that down a road not far from where you live or work, or where you grew up, there’s a clearing in the trees, a thinning of vegetation, and there, upon a thick slab of concrete, neat rows of tall column-like containers sit, and wait. It’s actually impossible to know how long these columns will be waiting, but even if they already have been waiting for decades, their stay has only just begun. All of these cask are marking time until the opening of America’s first geologic repository for the storage of high-level nuclear waste. Estimates as to when that might be range from sometime in the next century to—never.
As of November 2010, more than 1400 dry casks containing high-level nuclear waste were scattered throughout the United States— and this number increases with each passing year.
stranded fuel at Connecticut Yankee (aka Haddam Neck), CT
We’re in the midst of our research for Repository: A Typological Guide to America’s Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructure. Over the last couple of weeks, we have been stitching together partial histories, breaking news, and repeatedly redrawn policies and regulations. What emerges is a confounding, fragmented picture of America’s nuclear landscape and infrastructure. And it leads us to suspect that, with the canceling of the partially completed deep geological repository project at Yucca Mountain, America’s nuclear waste future has arrived—and it takes the form of the dry cask.
dry casks, image NRC
Dry cask storage “parking lots” were introduced into the American landscape in the late 1970s when cooling pools at commercial reactors began to fill to up. Now, several decades later, ever increasing amounts of spent fuel have filled pools again. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) estimates that all existing spent fuel pools will be full by 2015.
Current law requires that spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors (in most States, this means your local energy supplier) be allowed to cool in pools for five years before they are moved into dry casks. Casks contain stainless-steel canisters that house spent fuel rods surrounded by inert gas. The canisters are welded or bolted closed and encased in two-foot thick reinforced concrete. Some of the casks are designed for both storage and transportation. Each dry cask costs about $1-1.5 million.
Dry casks are licensed or certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for 20 years, with possible renewals of up to 40 years. The steel canisters inside the casks are more resilient than their concrete exteriors. But overall, cask design falls vastly short of the 1 million year safety margin mandated by the EPA to house spent fuel inside a geologic repository. The lifespan of the dry cask is desperately out of sync with the lifespan of what it attempts to contain. Long-lived fission products that exist in spent fuel include: Technetium-99 (half-life of 220,000 years), Iodine-129 (half-life of 17 million years), Neptunium-237 (half-life of two million years) and Plutonium-239 (half-life of 24,000 years). “Temporary” storage takes on a new meaning in this context.
Nevertheless, dry casks are our best attempts at addressing high-level waste storage at this moment. Casks are more stable and sturdy than cooling pools. They don’t require electricity and only rely on open air convection to further the cooling process. Their pads are said to be able to withstand earthquakes and hurricanes. Yet, no one has ever suggested that dry casks would, could, or even should endure the vast spans of time required for the quarantine of the waste they hold. The recently released final report (PDF) by the Blue Ribbon Commission on American’s Nuclear Future (BRC) documents the many ways that our nation’s nuclear waste storage procedures have been largely ad hoc to date. Many of the casks now residing at energy producing reactor sites are there “not by reasoned choice or intent, but by default” because there is nowhere else for it to go. Southern Nuclear, for example, is the operating company for two new reactors (Unit 3 and 4) recently approved for the expansion of Plant Vogtle in Georgia (the first new reactors to be approved since 1979). The company expects to fill 110 dry storage casks with the waste generated by Units 1 and 2 by 2035. Presumably, many more casks will follow to accomodate the waste that will be generated by the two new reactors.
stranded fuel at Big Rock Point, Michigan
One dry cask category has captured our imaginations. It is the special category that the Blue Ribbon Commission calls “stranded fuel.” At nine sites where dry casks are being stored in the United States, the reactors that initially produced the waste have been decommissioned and removed. With no electricity being produced at those sites, the only activities are “providing safety and security for dry storage casks”—and waiting. According to the Commission, “the continued presence of stranded fuel prevents those sites from being reclaimed for other uses that would benefit the surrounding communities, and makes those communities the unasked and unwilling hosts of long-term spent fuel storage facilities without any of the rights of participation or benefits that would be provided under the NWPA [Nuclear Waste Policy Act] to the host of a federal storage facility … in effect, these facilities are simply well-guarded parking lots for storage casks” (p.39-40).
We here at FOP have come to see dry casks and their surrounding exclusion zones as precursors of landscapes to come. They are protoscapes, first responders, first-iteration infrastructures stepping off into the future that stands before us and that has arrived before our design capabilities could catch up with our design needs. We will watch and see how they fare in the absence of long-term plans.
Given the political, economic, social, and scientific complexities involved in achieving consensus for the approval of a geologic repository, when we look at the dry cask, we’re looking at the foreseeable future of nuclear waste. And we see our country’s landscape bending to support the ever-growing dry cask population.
dry casks, images NRC
According to the Blue Ribbon Commission:
“The number of shutdown reactor sites with stranded fuel will grow sharply when increasing numbers of reactors reach the end of their operating lives, starting around 2030. The potential for rapid growth in the number of shutdown sites starts around 2030. While there are only nine sites in the shutdown category today, that number could reach 30 by 2035 and 70 by 2050. While subsequent life extensions beyond 60 years would push this curve farther into the future, it is also possible that not all currently operating reactors will in fact have their lives extended to 60 years, in which case the number of shutdowns would increase more rapidly.”
Of the current nine stranded fuel sites in the United States, seven have waste in dry storage, and two continue to store waste in cooling pools. Stranded fuel sites include: Big Rock Point, MI (7 casks); Connecticut Yankee, CT (40 casks); Humboldt Bay, CA (5 casks), La Crosse, WI (5 casks to come); Maine Yankee, ME (60 casks); Racho Seco, CA (21 casks); Trojan, OR (34 casks); Yankee Rowe, MA (15 casks); Zion, IL (61 casks to come).
The Blue Ribbon Commission has recommended that a central, “interim” facility (or perhaps even two) should be built to consolidate the casks of waste that are accumulating at 63 sites around the country. Given the history of waste facilities up to now, it’s possible that the casks will need to be maintained, scattered and in situ, for 300 years. This extended wait introduces new problems. As the Commission noted in its interim report: “spent fuel is generally not an attractive target for theft, due to its bulky form, substantial radiation levels, and difficulty for terrorists to process it to recover material that could be used in nuclear explosives. Old spent fuel, where radiation levels have dropped substantially, may generate increased risks for theft in the future” (p.44).
In the decades to come, dry casks may very well develop new meanings and material realities, presenting unanticipated challenges and requiring regulations we can’t begin to fathom from 2012.
dry casks at Diablo Canyon, CA image NRC
Thinking about dry casks for the past several weeks has actually begun to re-shape how we relate to time. We’re starting to see dry casks as time capsules whose materials draw our imaginations back 70 years to our nuclear origins. They also draw our imaginations into the far far future, where they seem to move through time more slowly. Or maybe it’s we and our cognitive capacities that are slow and outpaced by what we’re setting into motion today. When we see them for what they are in the present, we recognize that these casks stand apart from all that surrounds them, including we humans, not only because of what they hold, but also because of how differently they must endure. No human alive on the planet today will live to see a deep geologic repository open in the United States. But we all will live to see more and more casks. They are our enduring messengers, marching slowing into the deep future, though none of us will see what becomes of them.
A map called Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installations in the United States shows the locations of casks today. As of November 2010, there were 63 “independent spent fuel storage installations” (or ISFSIs) licensed to operate at 57 sites in 33 states (hosting the 1400 dry casks). An independent spent fuel storage installation, or ISFSI, is a facility that is designed and constructed for the interim storage of spent nuclear fuel. These facilities are licensed separately from a nuclear power plant and are considered independent even though they may be located on the site of another NRC-licensed facility.
Of all of the stranded fuel sites we learned about, we are particularly fascinated by Zion, IL, 40 miles from Chicago. Here, 2.2 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel and 80,000 pounds of highly radioactive material have been waiting in cooling pools since 1998 when the facility was retired. It’s likely these materials won’t be transferred to dry casks until sometime around 2022. But, when the material is finally transferred, 61 empty dry casks (more than at any other stranded fuel site, at present) will begin their long wait into the far future.
As ABC news in Chicago put it, ”It will take 10 years before the now-shuttered Zion nuclear power plant is completely decommissioned. By the time all is said and done, all that will remain of the 38-year-old plant is a 10-acre lot where the reactor’s spent fuel rods will be stored“—indefinitely.
dry cask storage at Palo Verde Nuclear Power Station, AZ (plenty of room for expansion).
Thingness of Energy, FOP 2012
Next Monday night FOP will be participating in a panel discussion, Energy!, at The New School, sponsored by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The event takes up the topic of energy in relation to speculative materialism:
Energy comes to us from the earth’s deepest crevices to the furthest reaches of the solar system — often through substantial technological advances, sometimes at equally substantial costs to people and the environment. This increasingly complex system of human agency and infrastructures is the topic of this exchange, organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In brief, succinct presentations, the speakers examine the potential scenarios if energy were to be considered a “partner” in the endeavor of producing and consuming energy. Reflecting recent developments in philosophy, sometimes grouped under the heading of “speculative materialism,” the panelists propose that energy is not dead matter but an active agent that needs to be recognized as such in order to make human life sustainable on this planet.Faculty members from across The New School analyze various notions of energy, drawing from their expertise in the political and natural sciences, media studies, environmentalism and design, as well as art. – Vera List Center website
Jamie Kruse of FOP will present a short piece based on research that informed one of the five boxes, Vibrant Matter and the Power of Configuration, that is part of her Thingness of Energy installation, currently housed at the Sheila Johnson Design Center. She will apply ideas drawn from vital materialism to recent events at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, and illustrate how humans and infrastructures exist not only in relation to one another and the landscape—but also in relation to a multitude of earth forces that are capable of rising up and challenging our best design and engineering capacities.
We’ve previously attended and been participants in Vera List Center events that follow the format of the “New School Moment.” Similar to PechaKucha, their provocative juxtapositions of perspectives delivered in succinct presentations have allowed ample discussion time and resulted in exchanges that were both generative and enjoyable.
Energy! is free and open to the public from 6:30-8:30 p.m. on March 5, 2012 at The New School’s Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor. Learn more about the panelists on the Vera List Center event page.
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In Miyako, Japan people went to high ground to escape the 1700 Cascadia tsunami. Their flight is reported in this book of government records from 1700, from the USGS publication, “Surviving a Tsunami—Lessons from Chile, Hawaii, and Japan.“
We just returned from the Making The Geologic Turn symposium at the University of Michigan. The new ideas and colleagues we met there encouraged us to renew and update our ongoing siting of “a geologic turn“—and get clearer about why, at this moment, “the geologic” seems so compelling.
The Taubman College symposium was curated by Etienne Turpin, and designed to explore a “productive new alliance” that is forming between architecture and geology. Participants came from design disciplines, visual arts, and theoretical humanities, and traced geology’s increasing influence in their disciplines.
Two of the presenters, Seth Denizen and Paulo Tavares, spoke directly to an idea that FOP has been working with over the past year. Namely, the hunch that a new cultural sensibility may be in the making. Architects, designers, artists, philosophers, journalists, and urban planners seem to be turning toward the geologic for help in understanding and responding to conditions of contemporary daily life.
Seth’s presentation suggested that a new “geologic aesthetic” might be emerging. And it takes the form of the ubiquitous hockey stick-like exponential curve.
“The material phenomena responsible for the reassessment of our present geological epoch, as one which is for the first time driven by forces of human origin, are understood empirically as exponential. Whether it’s population, ocean temperature, energy consumption, or atmospheric gasses, the speed of the material relations of human life find themselves ultimately approaching an asymptote.”
Seth offered a litany of graphs, similar to these, to illustrate his point:
Seth projected numerous graphs of today’s material and geologic conditions of life on Earth, and said:
“The strange thing about these curves, is that the farther along the curve one projects the present, the shorter the time interval between successive points, until time all but stops, in the midst of an immense acceleration. At this point, the world becomes defined not by a time, but by a speed. This is the point at which the world can no longer be imagined as merely an extension of our own, as a difference in degree, but ultimately something which takes on a difference in kind: another sea, another wind, another world at right angles with our own.”
In the wake of Seth’s presentation, we couldn’t help wondering: Is the speed of change in the material realities of life on the planet outpacing our ways of knowing? Everything we humans think we know about living on Earth, and everything we thought was useful for life here, was invented by ancestors who lived during times when the hockey stick graphs were relatively “flat.” But, as Seth put it, we’re now living at right angles with that (former) world. We’re now living on a qualitatively different planet. While that doesn’t necessarily mean that human knowledge needs to start over, it does mean we need to rethink, reconfigure, and reinvent “what we know” from an entirely different angle (the vertical, accelerating rise). And we need to do that quickly.
image courtesy Paulo Tavares
What sorts of inventive thinking are possible and called for in response to new conditions of the Anthropocene? São Paulo and London based architect, Paulo Tavares, offered a compelling example. In 2008, he said, Ecuador adopted a new constitution. It granted inalienable rights to nature: “Alongside the fundamental rights attributed to the citizens of the State of Ecuador, the constitution establishes fundamental rights to natural communities and eco-systems, inscribing nature as a subject of the national legal code.” Paulo went on to lay out the difference that such a legal innovation makes in formulating responses to events such as the 2010 Gulf oil spill. It’s worth quoting at length from a version of Paulo’s presentation published online by Critical Legal Thinking. It’s entitled Common Rights: Humans as Nature, Nature as Human:
In 1990, with the publication of The Natural Contract, Michel Serres was already anticipating the consequences of this new socio-geological order we have created. As he wrote, humanity has become “physical actors in the physical systems of the Earth”. . . nature could no longer be understood as inert resource materials available for limitless appropriation. Instead, ecosystems should be conceptualized as living and vibrant agents with which humans were co-existing in constant and delicate interactions. . .
Michel Serres philosophical speculations gained a real dimension in 2008, when Ecuador adopted a new constitution in which nature is granted inalienable rights. . .
… being attributed with definitions ordinarily bound to citizenship, non-human natural communities abandon the status of property – even of “common property” – to become bearing-rights entities. At the same time, nature ceases to be framed as an object of which forms of possession and use should be regulated by government in order to be presented as a form-of-life whose right to existence should be guaranteed and protected by the State.
The politics of rights implied here is drawn from the right of rather than the right to the environment. Not the rights that attempt to grant equal and just possession of nature, but the rights that nature itself possesses.
Seth’s and Paulo’s presentations performed, right there in the auditorium, responsive, pragmatic, consequential turns toward the geologic. Each took up the geologic as a partner to humans. Each turned to the geologic for assistance in the task of designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences capable of responding to the accelerating change and qualitative, material difference that has become contemporary life. Each considered the geologic from new angles—from points along the exponential curves of “now.” Along those curves, what used to be defined as the study of the origin, history, and structure of Earth takes on new meanings, questions, and approaches.
Of course, “the geologic” continues to consider rocks, tectonics, and brute forces of our planet, including deep time. But Paulo’s references to Serres hints at what geology might become, as we struggle to understand and meet new and unprecedented material realities of Earth and life on Earth.
Our experience of the symposium led us to experiment with a passage from Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. It’s an experiment that helps us imagine an expanded field of geology beyond the realm of rocks. We took the liberty of appropriating Latour’s efforts to redirect “sociology” into the messy realm of “the social” (which is always entangled in associations) for our purposes. In the following passage, when we substitute “geology” for “sociology” and “the geologic” for “the social,” we get:
“Even though most geologists would prefer to call ‘the geologic‘ a homogeneous thing, it’s perfectly acceptable to designate by the same word a trail of associations between heterogeneous elements. Since in both cases the word retains the same origin—from Latin root geo—its is possible to remain faithful to the original intuitions of the geologic sciences by redefining geology not as the ‘science of the geologic‘, but as the tracing of associations. In this meaning of the adjective, geologic does not designate a thing among other things, like a black sheep among white sheep, but a type of connection between things that are not themselves geologic.” (Experimental reading of Latour, adapted from Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory, pg. 5)
It’s a lively outcome. One that springs geology into the realms of everyday actions, movements, associations among humans and nonhumans.
Jane Bennett urges us to consider thinking of the geologic not in terms of objects, but in terms of volatile and vibrant relationships. She would see “the geologic” as specific types of connection between things geologic and things not geologic. Doing this, she says, we would gain “new confederates to work with, new actants to make things and processes with, and new capacities to learn from.” Such ways of thinking ask us to get creative. They require us to “devise new procedures, technologies, and regimes of perception that enable us to consult nonhumans more closely, or to listen and respond more carefully to their outbreaks, objections, testimonies and propositions.” (Bennett, from Vibrant Matter, p. 108)
Few would deny that nonhuman aspects of “the geologic” have been objecting, testifying, proposing, and breaking out. And doing so with growing intensity and human consequence. In FOP’s call for contributions to Making a Geologic Turn, we chronicled some of the recent incursions that geologic forces have made into human life and affairs. And we pointed to signs that individuals and fields of thought are beginning to reframe the geologic—as a condition of contemporary life. In that call, we focused on how new technologies for visualizing earth forces and materials on a global scale and across deep time are give humans qualitatively different sensibilities about geologic dynamics. And, how the densities and locations of human habitation on Earth, especially in highly technologized urban areas, make humans vulnerable to and aware of geologic forces and change in new ways.
Our experiences of last week’s symposium in Ann Arbor have been clarifying. We’re able to describe a bit more fully the ideas and events that fall within our framing of the still nascent geologic turn.
If we were asked: ” what is propelling a geologic turn?,” we would list the changes we describe in our call for submissions. For us, changes that propel a geologic turn include: recent geologic events and their impact on human life and infrastructure; new visualizations of the scale, movement, and time of geologic forces; and qualitatively different scales of human population’s exposure and vulnerability to the geologic, which make the geologic a condition of contemporary life.
light reflecting from a piece of space junk traveling NW-SE, July 2010, image Bob MacInnes
But now, we would add several more. A geologic turn is being propelled, as well, by changes in:
- . . . what we count as “the environment.” In the 1970s, the environmental movement focused its concern on the surface of the earth—on the soil, water, living organisms, and atmosphere that compose the thin layer that is the biosphere. This is now changing. We’ve gained new understandings of the figurative and literal depth of the enmeshment of the bio and the geo. It’s now difficult to hold onto previous distinctions between animal, vegetable and mineral. Current understandings of earth cycles show that the bio is instrumental in the composition, history, and future of the geo. We now know that solar flares, asteroids, and supervolcanoes can alter and have altered the course of biological life on earth in a matter of seconds. This awareness extends what we consider to be our environment far beyond Earth’s surface. The soci-geo-bio “order” that we live today draws all things on Earth—human and nonhuman—into relation at a much vaster breadth and depth than acknowledged by the environmentalism of the 1970s. When we think across the geo and the bio, we arrive at much thicker accounts of “the environment.” The landscape or surface that architects design for and build upon has shifted. It can no longer be taken to be that single, thin, folded surface depicted by computer aided design software. Today, the geologic counts as “the environment” and extends it out to the cosmos and down to the Earth’s iron core.
- . . . what we count as the geologic. The theory of plate tectonics is barely 60 years old. Until recently, geology was nearly synonymous with the study of rocks and the reading of sediments—often in pursuit of resource extraction. Today, the global flows of resources, wastes, and fuels create complex, moving entanglements of earth materials, geologic events, technologies, objects, chemicals, weather, information, people and other living things. Over the past couple of years, FOP has attempted to express and visualize “the geologic” as interwoven with the rise in global populations; nested within the challenges of nuclear waste storage; enfolded in carbon emissions; caught up in the rise of tsunami waves; orbiting the planet as space trash, stuck in the stagnant center of the vortex that is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and fermenting in the hills of the Freshkills landfill. The geologic “now” is a teeming assemblage of exchange and interaction among the bio, geo, cosmo, socio, political, legal, economic, strategic, and imaginary. The geologic lives in our bones (as calcium) and our cell phone screens (as indium tin oxide). The geologic “now” in which we live, and for which we design urban spaces and infrastructures, is an ongoing procession of assemblages that were formed in the deep past and are arriving into the present. The geologic passes through our time as the materials and forces that compose us, and that we transform to compose our world. Geo-bio-socio assemblages reconfigure and ramify geologic materials and forces, with growing consequence, into the stuff of deep futures. What if we designed for that? What if we made art about that?
- . . . how we relate to the geologic. In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett urges us to understand “the geologic” as a vital force and active agent in daily life. It would be advisable, productive, and even ethical for contemporary philosophers to “theorize a kind of geological affect or material vitality” that recognizes the “shimmering, potentially violent vitality intrinsic to matter” (Vibrant Matter, p. 61).The Japanese earthquakes and tsunamis of 2011 exceeded humans’ best attempts to anticipate and temper the potential impact of the geologic-as-actant on highly technologized daily life. The shattering of these best architectural, infrastructural, and engineering attempts has opened up new potentials. Humans must now invent and actually adopt new modes of action at the intersections of the human and the geologic. We can no longer relate to the Earth as brute, static material: rocks, mountains, canyons, continents. Mountains are in constant motion. The stuff of rocks is in continuous transformation. The Earth’s crust is a conveyor belt that digests continents and regurgitates new land masses. Earth has a finite life span constrained by its cosmic environment. New understandings of the power of relatively ephemeral geo-bio-socio assemblages have altered our sense of the geologic. The Earth is no longer the inert matter outside of ourselves that is there to support us and our buildings. The geologic is a cascade of events. Humans and what we build participate in their unfolding.
- . . . how we cohabit with the geologic. Making a geologic turn, we create an opportunity to recalibrate infrastructures, communities, and imaginations to a new scale: the scale of geologic time, force, and materiality. Scaling our designs and desires to the geologic would require us to assemble responsively with the non-human scale of geo-forces in play on this planet. Such a move has the potential to turn us (once again?) toward what is most real about human life on this planet: we are not simply “surrounded” by the geologic. We do not simply observe it as landscape or panorama. We live within it. This means that humans are always forced to come to terms with the geologic, eventually. But it can mean more than that. Perhaps the qualitatively new and different cultural sensibility that is signaled by those making a geologic turn is this: as the very tissue of human existence, geologic assemblages are vibrant forces, and they are capable of instructing not only contemporary life, but architecture and design practices as well.
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image courtesy Etienne Turpin
“Recent discourse in the fields of architecture, art, and philosophy suggest the increasing influence of geology with the design disciplines, visual arts, and theoretical humanities. The symposium The Geologic Turn: Architecture’s New Alliance … aims to bring together researchers, scholars, and practitioners whose work is at the centre of this fecund transdisciplinary research trajectory. The objectives of the symposium are: first, to allow new productive connections among current scholarship and practice, and second, to expose the students and faculty of the Taubman College to these new transdisciplanary ideas and projects. - Etienne Turpin, symposium curator
Laura Moriarty, “Subduction into Trench”, 2011, image courtesy the artist
We’re honored to be a catalyst for and invited participants in The Geologic Turn: Architecture’s New Alliance, a symposium to be hosted by the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, February 10-11, 2012. The event is free and open to the public. A full schedule appears on the symposium website.
Mt. Saint Helens ash covering airplanes at the Kelso/Longview Airport, May 26, 1980, by Pete Lipman., courtesy USGS/Cascades Volcano Observatory
William Lamson, “A Line Describing the Sun.”, 2010, image courtesy the artist
FOP’s presentation will announce early sightings of a new and expanding cultural sensibility. Recent natural and human-made events triggered by or triggering the geologic have made earth forces sense-able and relevant with new levels of intensity. Journalists and cultural producers are turning toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for understanding and responding to conditions of contemporary life. We’ve written about this geologic turn quite frequently on this blog, including here and here.
At the symposium, we’ll share examples of how artists, designers, and architects have begun to explore and creatively respond to the geologic depth of “now.” Several are contributors to our edited collection currently under review, Making A Geologic Turn. And we will present our own work as a test site for what becomes thinkable or possible when we humans turn to the geologic as our instructive co-designer—as our partner in designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences.
Oblique aerial view of landslide that buried Colonia Las Colinas, USGS image
We’ll report back on what this concentrated weekend of geologic thinking and conversation, applied to the field of architecture and design, might make possible. Stay tuned for updates.
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Download a PDF poster for the event here.
*Sincere thanks to Etienne Turpin, editor of Scapegoat Journal (current issue: Materialism), for the invitation and enthusiasm for our work.
detail, Scales of Light and Heat (Humans = Watt?) Convert Yourself (Thingness of Energy), Jamie Kruse 2011-2
One British Thermal Unit (BTU), a unit of energy, is equivalent to one burning match.
In 2011 The New School consumed 14 million kilowatt hours of electricity, equivalent to approximately 48 billion burning matches.
After six months of research and production, a project by smudge studio’s Jamie Kruse, entitled the Thingness of Energy, opens next Thursday, February 2, 2012. smudge invites you to the opening reception at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design, from 6:30-9:00pm. The exhibition Where Do We Migrate To?, curated by Niels Van Tomme, opens this same evening in the nearby Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery.
The Thingness of Energy invites audiences to consider and directly experience the material realities of energy. Taking The New School’s Climate Action Plan (PDF) as its point of departure, the project reveals the deep geologic nature and effects of the materials that are used to generate and transmit electricity. It also underscores the power of deep time—both past and future—as a generator of energy forms and effects. The installation brings into view things of energy that exist both within the walls of The New School and arrive at the University from far beyond the borders of New York State.
At its heart, Thingness of Energy poses the question: What if “anticipating geologic scales of force, change, and effect” became a common design specification for energy production, policies, and infrastructure design?
The project is composed of five boxes: Distributed Matter, Energy of Deep Time, Scales of Light and Heat (Humans = Watt?) Convert Yourself, Carbon Trading Across the Eons, and Vibrant Matter and the Power of Configuration. The boxes, accompanied by three large vinyl window installations, offer motivations for interacting with things of energy in new ways that take into account the realities of their material natures. A “material bibliography” provides reading material and source documentation for the research that supported the project’s development.
The project will be on exhibit until April 24, 2012.
For gallery hours, to learn more about the project and upcoming programming visit the Vera List Center for Art and Politics’ artist project page and the smudge studio project page.
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The Thingness of Energy is produced in collaboration with The New School’s Office of Sustainability, Facilities Management; the Sheila Johnson Designer Center; and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The project is supported in part by The New School’s Green Fund for 2012 and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and presented on occasion of the Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.“
Jichinsai (地鎮祭), a ground breaking ceremony in Japan, July 2010, image
In Japan, it’s common to pay respect to kami (spirits, natural forces, or essence in Shinto faith) before constructing buildings. The Jichinsai ritual, is a purification ceremony considered necessary to clear away bad luck that might be connected to a plot of land. A shinto priest (kannushi,) is commonly present to pray for safety, happiness, and protection of the designated area from disaster.
Throughout history, humans have felt it necessary to acknowledge that what we build exists in relation to forces much larger than ourselves. Think Stonehenge, the Mayan Temple of Kukulkan and Chaco Canyon, with their complex celestial alignments.
Our building know-how may have grown phenomenally over the past several millennia, but sometimes it is still no match for the planet’s geological or meteorological events.
Modern humans rely on ever more complex and networked infrastructures. How would any New Yorker manage daily life without the City’s 2,027 bridges and 24+ tunnels? 60,000 elevators? 24 subway lines? Or perhaps most essential of all, the Department of Sanitation? The lifestyles we attempt to maintain are intimately entwined with materials and actions that keep cars running, highways paved, and bridges sound. If our roofs don’t keep out rain and wind, our homes and apartments start to lose structural integrity in a matter of weeks.
lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge, FOP 2007
elevator shaft, image icopythat
Humans have built vast infrastructural networks across the globe. Without the “grid” and its wildly complex components of generation, transmission and distribution, pretty much nothing would operate at all. While it may be impossible to design for all scenarios and all scales of event, it’s also a fact that the things we build are subject to more than one force at a time. Wind, rain, usage, and time itself weather materials in uneven, unpredictable patterns. Humans introduce additional elements of uncertainty. It’s not uncommon for human folly to set in motion some of the most disasterous infrastructural events. The more we rely on infrastructures for the largest and smallest aspects of contemporary life (light, heat, food, transit, health care etc. etc.), the more our very lives become vulnerable to unpredictable outcomes when our systems encounter forces beyond what was planned for or desired.
Last March, the six hundred+ year old Japanese tsunami warning stones perched above much of the disaster’s wreckage were stark reminders that humans might be forgetting one of our most vital bits of socially inherited knowledge: all infrastructure projects must be designed and sited in relation to essentially unpredictable and potentially destructive forces larger than ourselves, because even the best designs and technologies can fail to predict, prevent, or defend against these forces.
tsunami stone, Aneyoshi, Japan, image Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
This spring, we will continue to work with these newly-urgent realizations as we spend a month in Japan. While based in Kyoto, we will engage in a cross-continental collaboration with DodoLab, the Canadian art and design program. DodoLab will be continuing their project on infrastructures of mineral extraction in Sudbury, Ontario (a place we’re written about twice on FOP, here and here).
The name of our shared exploratory endeavor is Amulets for Infrastructure or インフラ の御守 in Japanese. The project is predicated on the acknowledgement that all human-designed architecture and infrastructures never have been, and never will be, immune to forces of change.
Our project is inspired by omamori, small pouches that many Japanese people use in ways similar to how some Westerners use talismans (from Greek ”telein” which means “to initiate into the mysteries”). Omamori are made sacred by religious rituals that transform them into busshin (spiritual offshoots) or kesshin (manifestations) of the deity. They are objects that contain the spiritual essence and powers of a deity or buddha, and they are usually carried on one’s person, backpack or purse. These small amulets can be purchased at shrines and temples all over Japan. They offer their owners protection and good luck. It’s common for students to secure at least one before taking exams, or for a new one to be purchased at the start of each year. Some omamori are designed to provide traffic safety, others to ensure a safe pregnancy.
But as far as we know, there hasn’t yet been an omamori dedicated, broadly, to infrastructure writ large.
traditional omamori
Our trans-cultural collaboration and creative interpretation of omamori will be a humble, material acknowledgement of the reality that our planet is full of dynamic forces capable of serving up compounding impacts that can overwhelm and out scale our best attempts at infrastructural design.
Over the course of two weeks in early April smudge studio and DodoLab will stage talisman/omamori projects in our respective locations. This will include the soliciting of images (photographic, diagrammatic, poetic) and stories pertaining to infrastructures that people would like to have protected (infrastructures that carry a particularly personal meaning or proximity are most welcome). We’ll also gather site-specific data and responses related to our given locations (Sudbury and Kyoto/Tokyo). Possible “things” of inclusion in the “amulets for infrastructure” projects include: elevators, mine shafts, cars, bridges, roads, post offices, heating pipes, internet cables, the electrical “grid,” nuclear power plants, and perhaps even infrastructures to come, such as deep geologic repositories for nuclear waste.
Shinkansen, aka bullet train, in Tokyo Japan, FOP 2008
Second level of Creighton Mine, Sudbury, Canada [ca. 1905], Department of Mines and Northern Affairs, Reference Code: RG 13-30, Archives of Ontario, I0004649
The results of the collaboration will be developed in late spring and early summer, and then exhibited publicly in Canada, the United States, and Japan. Additional project details will come as available, so stayed tuned for more information on how to participate.
To us, it seems obvious that this project’s time has come. The global infrastructures that we rely on need more than a bit of luck, perhaps even a bit of divine intervention, to safely endure the coming decades of climate change, stalled economies, and unforeseeable geologic events. A quick Google search of “infrastructure and luck” shows that we aren’t the only ones thinking this way:
“We are using up our reservoir of good luck,” said Richard Brodsky, a former New York State legislator who last week lost a lawsuit on the level of insulation required around electrical cables at Indian Point. “The chances of an accident at Indian Point are small but the consequences are so dramatic.” - ABC news
“If that satellite goes, our space weather prediction system will be crippled. We got off light with the solar storm this time, but our luck will run out eventually—and possibly quite soon, because the current solar cycle is set to peak over the next couple of years. A “Space Katrina” could be inevitable—at the very least we should be able to see it coming. - Time magazine
Bay Bridge’s Run of Bad Luck “Meanwhile you might want to dig up that old troll doll from your bottom drawer. Keep it beside you in the car to give the Bay Bridge some new good luck.”
“The Evergreen Point Floating Bridge on Lake Washington, Washington had an 11-year run of bad luck. The pontoon bridge’s deck cracked open in 1989, then again in 1991. Then, eight years later, strong winds split the bridge in two. In 2000, it was damaged by a collision.” - NPR
