The Center for Land Use Interpretation explores how land in the United States is apportioned, utilized, and perceived. Through exhibitions and public programs, the Center interprets built landscapes—from landfills and urban waterfalls to artificial lakes—as cultural artifacts that help define contemporary American life and culture. Coolidge discusses the Center’s approach to finding meaning in the intentional and incidental forms we create and also talk about the Center’s efforts to develop the American Land Museum, a curated selection of locations across the country that exemplifies our relationship with the American landscape.
About the Speaker
Matthew Coolidge, Director, Center for Land Use Interpretation
Matthew Coolidge is Founder and Director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles, a non-profit research and education organization founded in 1994 that is interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface, and in finding new meanings in the intentional and incidental forms that we individually and collectively create. He has a background in contemporary art, architecture, and film, and studied environmental science as an undergraduate at Boston University. He has been a teacher in the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of Art, and has lectured and worked with students at universities around the U.S. and abroad.
Curatorial Innovations Lecture at Menschel Hall, Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street
Presented by the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture in collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Graduate School of Design
Recorded April 17, 2019
Transcript
[00:00:04.27] Welcome to the Harvard Art Museums, and tonight's lecture, the American Land Museum, places as cultural artifacts. My name is Mitchell Johns, and I'm a senior living in Dunster House. And I concentrate in English with a second degree in computer science.
[00:00:18.69] And my name is Maia Suazo-Maler. I'm also a senior living in Winthrop house, and I study the history of art and architecture and computer science. Mitch and I are both members of the Harvard Art Museums student board, and we're delighted to welcome you to the museum on this evening on behalf of our student community.
[00:00:35.62] Please now, be sure to turn off your cell phones. And help me warmly welcome Martha Tedeschi, the Elizabeth and John Morris Cabot director of the Harvard Art Museums who will introduce tonight's program.
[00:00:48.38] [APPLAUSE]
[00:00:56.69] Thank you, Maia and Mitchell for that great introduction. We're famous at the Harvard Art Museums for having introducers who introduce introducers, and who then introduce the introducers before we get to the lecture. But, that's because we're also happy to be here, and all of us want to have a chance to welcome you. So, good evening everyone.
[00:01:18.11] As a longtime museum curator myself and now as director of the Harvard Art Museums, I'm delighted to welcome you to this year's curatorial innovations lecture. Launched in 2014, the curatorial innovations lecture is an annual collaboration between the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture and the Harvard Art Museums. Each year the program brings to campus internationally renowned curators who are breaking new ground in the organization of exhibits, displays, projects, and are transforming the museum field through innovative curatorial practice.
[00:01:57.68] Through a series of student workshops and public lectures these speakers inspire students from diverse fields of knowledge and the broader public with new ideas about how museums and curators can bridge the sciences and the arts. The partnership foregrounds the essential role that original works of art, specimens, artifacts, and archives play in teaching across disciplines, and seeks to provoke and challenge the way we think about curating these objects.
[00:02:31.01] We're thrilled tonight to welcome Matthew Coolidge to discuss his innovative work at the American Land Museum, which brings the museum to the object rather than the object into the museum. I want to warmly thank, Jane Pickering, Peter Galison, and the entire team of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture for their continued partnership in this innovative program. The collaboration has already helped to catalyze broader conversations about curatorial practice on campus, and we'll continue to move our shared work forward.
[00:03:07.66] Now, please join me in welcoming Peter Galison, the Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and Physics to the podium to introduce our distinguished speaker. Peter.
[00:03:21.18] [APPLAUSE]
[00:03:26.97] It's a great pleasure to welcome Matthew Coolidge here today to our curatorial seminar that we've been hosting for these last several years because we think it's a moment, all of us at all of the various Harvard Museums, when curation can be can occupy a much larger and important role within the cultural landscape and learning landscape of the university.
[00:03:54.33] Matthew's work is exemplary because it cuts across the lines of our various museums, which run across from the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and the Neurological Museum, the Anthropological Museum, the Peabody, the Art Museums, and the collection of historical scientific instruments. Many of the students in history of science with whom I've had the privilege of working have been interested in the question of how land itself can be considered a technical object as well as the host of aesthetic, historical, and social engagement.
[00:04:31.38] And so, it was really a particularly great pleasure that Matthew's been willing to join us. He is, in many ways, an exemplification of the intersection of military, historical, social, technical, and artistic engagement with the projects about which he's going to be speaking today at the at the Wendover Branch, which was the Air Force Base from which the planes practiced the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, also a site in the contemporary world, it's abutted by places of radioactive dumping, of sharp shooting, of drone practices, of mining.
[00:05:19.50] And because of his work and the work of the center that he's directed also of artistic engagement in new ways of photography and filming and other sorts of installation projects. Matt, I've read once in one of his interviews, a very interesting interviews, that Matthew likes to think of the photography work that goes on there as neither so beautiful that it represents a disengagement from the world and a pure engagement with art, nor so bad that it's very dysfunction calls attention to the medium and loses sight of the content in which it is engaged.
[00:05:59.91] So, it's in looking at this multiplicity of ways of glossing the land itself, of being interested in place, its history, its current use, and all of the ways that its stands symbolically and actually in our society that Matthew Coolidge, and his colleagues, and visitors, and artists, have been able to really transform the way we look at land, landscape, art, and our current use of that land in a new way.
[00:06:36.15] It's with great pleasure that I want to welcome Matthew Coolidge.
[00:06:39.97] [APPLAUSE]
[00:06:48.96] Can you hear me OK? I'm going to switch to this microphone.
[00:06:51.89] Yup.
[00:06:52.29] Yeah, great. Well, thank you, Peter, for that wonderful introduction and everybody else, for enabling me to come share with you some images and ideas about the American landscape. I'm not sure when I appear at activities like this how many people really know about what we do. So, for those who are familiar with it, I just wanted to give a general overview of the organization in order to understand the context from which I'll explain and explore other things.
[00:07:23.11] This is our logo, which was the first thing I did was to create this kind of corporate identity, the Center for Land Use. We are nonprofit organization. We've been around since 1994. What we do is look at the built landscape of the USA as a kind of cultural artifact that we try and interpret and read in order to understand who we are despite all the bigness and complications involved in such a big task.
[00:07:58.62] We're interested in the physical landscape as an architectural or a archeological specimen in a way of contemporary culture. And we're interested in the interpretive realm that floats above the ground. The ground itself, of course, is just sort of inert material. Though there isn't a single molecule this point on the surface of the Earth that hasn't been affected by human agency in some form, so all of it is an artifact, really everything on the surface. So, we start with that as kind of a given.
[00:08:29.67] And but still, by itself, of course the ground means nothing you have to elucidate meaning from it. And I'll just show this image, which I can't seem to not show to explain the phenomenology of place. So, here you have the inert landscape, some desert. And then, you have the interpretive plaque that interprets something that happened there. But it's not really that engaged with the site. It very clearly was sort of added to the site.
[00:08:59.27] And then, you have the guy with a hat interpreting the interpretive plaque. And then, the guy with the camera doing some kind of video documentary about the guy with a hat who's interpreting the interpretive plaque that interprets the site. And then, you have the thing that's invisible that makes all of this visible, the photographer taking a picture of the guy with a video camera doing a video about the guy with a hat who's interpreting the interpretive plaque that interprets the site. And of course, it doesn't stop there.
[00:09:27.75] There's me telling you about the photographer who took the picture of the guy with the camera. Anyways. And then, there's maybe you, maybe, telling somebody about me telling you about the photographer and anyways. So, this is where we work in that realm of interpretation that floats above the ground where meaning is actually constructed. So, in a way it has very little to do, on one hand, with the physical material of the Earth, though it has everything to do with it as well.
[00:09:56.23] The other basic principle I just wanted to convey in understanding the fundamental structure of the organization is that we always look at the other side of things too. We try and acknowledge the fact that the act of looking is at the same time an act of obfuscation. When your attention is directed toward something, it's immediately drawn from everything else, away from everything else. So, there is always another side.
[00:10:22.02] And in fact, much of it is the other side. So there's always more to every story. And for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction as they say.
[00:10:31.59] And then, this sort of fundamental paradox that you can have multiple points of view existing simultaneously about one thing. So, that's something we keep in mind all the time too is that there are many ways of looking at any given situation. It might be this sort of quantum kind of cognition or condition we're in now.
[00:10:55.68] So, we collect information on places, physical locations. We store information. We sort it. We classify it. The bedrock of our organization are selected locations that are locked down with some kind of [? Latalong. ?] They actually exist in space there. And there are filing cabinets that are bursting with information about these places all sorted to location by state.
[00:11:22.17] But also, these are our primary classification categories of every kind of land use fits into one of these. We squeeze it in there. And it's really about information management more than reality. Obviously, you can have one thing be many things, and most things are many things.
[00:11:41.55] But still, in order to retrieve something you have to know where stored. It has to exist in some compartment otherwise it's all just a gray blob. And anybody who works in library sciences and stuff knows this very, very well. We all deal with this kind of classification system, and how things are made to be concrete even though they aren't in order to be retrievable.
[00:12:04.62] But, this also gives you a sense of how the center begins to look at the world in terms of its different organizational approaches. And we take the information that we collect, and the imagery is all done by people working for the organization. So, we don't store historic photos. We occasionally use them in exhibits and things.
[00:12:29.82] But most of the time, 99.99% of the imagery and video that we use to make exhibits and things are taken by people working for the organization as a primary view, so rather than a secondarial kind of image resource or image agency. We're not that. We have our first view. It may be secondary to those viewing it, but it's primed from the source, as it were, from us.
[00:13:00.67] We do stuff for the web. We do actual exhibits. Most of our work is taking the information, the imagery, and doing these kind of thematic and regional exhibits for other institutions as well as our own facilities.
[00:13:13.99] We also arrange excursions into these spaces, connecting dots, and having local representatives come on board to talk about things. We do field trips with school groups. We make publications.
[00:13:30.87] This is from a series, American Regional Landscape series. This is about the Hudson River. We did three books now with Blast Books of New York. But primarily, we understand that most of the audience for what we do is on the internets. And that's where our work really is absorbed.
[00:13:53.67] We are very ground based, as you can tell, and we have several locations that we've had for years. We also have some that are ephemeral, interpretive facilities, but our desert research station near Barstow is about sort of the back space of California, a backspace of Los Angeles, and deals with phenomenology about that landscape.
[00:14:16.98] A lot of creative projects relating to the way sound or really electromagnetic waves in a sense are sort of manifested, captured, manipulated for detection, and for radar, and remote sensing. So, these are some of the kind of themes that we explore at the desert research station.
[00:14:39.31] And we have a walking trail with a number of features. This is a kind of a sonic binoculars constructed by an artist named Deborah Stratman. This is another artist's construction, LeRoy Stevens buried this massive steel sculpture underground out at the desert research station, and the only way to, well, see it, quote-unquote, is to detect it using metal detectors. And people wander around, and they have these tone shifts as you sort of approach a piece of the sculpture. So, it sort of manifests itself as a sort of reaction to detection through sonic seeing.
[00:15:27.87] Anyhow, at Wendover, Utah we have on the edge of the Bonneville Salt Flats several buildings we rent from the county, and it's the old air base for Word World II training the Colonel Tibbetts' crew as well as a lot of other activity during World War II.
[00:15:46.53] But it's remarkable place because it's on the edge of one of the great voids of America, the Bonneville flats, and the Great Salt Lake desert, and part of the Great Basin, doesn't drain anywhere, so it's kind of this isolated zone. The Great Salt Lake being a kind of a puddle in the bottom of the basin in some senses, and everything that is drawn to the sort of away space that it has evolved there because of the high evaporation and the salinity that builds up in the soil.
[00:16:16.14] And the fact that it's this terminal landscape of melted mountains and completely flat means that the things-- it's hard to live there. It's hard to grow things there, so there isn't much population in the flats. And so, the things that like nowhere, quote-unquote, are drawn there such as nuclear waste storage, and driving on the ground as fast as you can in no particular direction for no reason at the Bonneville Flats, and all kinds of movies looking for the end of the world, and all kinds of rocket tests because there's no fear of hitting anything, and the Dugway Proving ground and all on, and on, and on.
[00:16:55.98] So this, in a way, is the backspace for America, one of them, but it's still one of the great ones. An internal fringe and for 20 more years, we've had people come out and interpret this landscape through creative or residency programs and things. We even have a biosphere three kind of miniature version of a self-contained living-working environment on the flats at this sort of terminal kind of landscape.
[00:17:23.01] We say, well, how to do you begin to construct positive living systems in this dead place? And that's part of the function of this facility built by this group called SIMPARCH.
[00:17:37.98] So, we have trailers, these office trailers, that we use different locations or we rent for doing more focused regional projects. This one's in Houston. We worked for a few years looking at the petrochemical industry of the region working with the University of Houston.
[00:17:58.94]
[00:18:00.24] This is another trailer we had for several years at the edge of Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, and we were focusing on New Mexico as this sort of high tech environment, I guess you could say, high tech landscape of enchantment.
[00:18:23.28] This is a trailer that toured around all the different centers of the USA with an exhibit about all the centers of the USA. You know, the geographic center, the geodetic center, the population center, the center of North America, the center of the 48 states, all these different centers. All of which are attempts to try and create a middle ground of the nation. In a way, a kind of an averaging out of landscape.
[00:18:51.24] And because it's about centers, and we're the center for land use interpretation, we love centers and the idea of centers no matter how elusive they are. Of course, you know, you both know there has to be a center for every giant shape like the USA. But then, of course, how do you actually get to it? And you can't. You get to iterations of it, and yet all of them are genuine in a sense.
[00:19:18.36] And so, this trailer traveled to those different centers bringing them together in a sense before ending up in Lebanon, Kansas where we had it as a public display for several years. Lebanon being where the 48 states were declared the center before Alaska and Hawaii joined the union. So it is more of a-- I don't know. It feels more like the center than a lot of the other ones, to us at least.
[00:19:44.02] And it officially was declared the center of the USA by the government. Something they regretted doing soon after in the 50s realizing that it really was more complicated than that. But it was a good thing for poor old Lebanon. One of these old towns, agricultural towns that sort of dried up and almost blown away.
[00:20:07.56] But anyhow, well, like a lot of our exhibits that we put in these trailers and install in existing buildings, they're accessed with a push button door lock. And you get the telephone number by looking at the sign on the door. You call the number. You get the phone tree. The phone tree gives you an option for how to get into the building, which in most cases, is just one, two. It's pretty easy. Easier than, one, two, three.
[00:20:33.84] But, this is a way in which we're able to keep the kids who are bored and want to trash stuff. And nobody is going to call and get permission to go trash something. So they, you know, we are able to actually have a number of these remote exhibit facilities available to the public in these office trailers.
[00:20:52.20] And we love office trailers. We've done whole shows about office trailers. And we work with the Getty on this architectural Pacific Standard Time project. They asked us to do something about how the city of LA is growing, and these different construction projects, the widening of the freeway, and all this kind of expansion of the future city.
[00:21:14.23] And we said, well, we'd like to a project about office trailers in the context of these construction projects. And they said, OK, so we made an exhibit about office trailers in an office trailer. Where do they come from? Who uses them? All the different typologies and formations of office trailers. You know, you can use them as classrooms. You can use them to expand your prison space. So you can spend much of your life in the office trailer.
[00:21:41.79] But also just as sort of these architectural transition zones between the public and the hardhats. It's where you go put on your hard hat to go behind the office trailer. In a sense, they are these kind of interstices between regular space, and construction space, and building space. And then, we did a series of bus tours going on these extra office trailers. Safaris into Los Angeles, meeting with the engineers who were working on these projects.
[00:22:10.01] And, you know, the biggest cluster of office trailers in LA, of course, is usually LAX, the big airport that always has some kind of construction going on. And we met with Mr. Fentress, who was building the international terminal. And he was architect, and he was kind enough to give a PowerPoint to the group when we went into his office trailer.
[00:22:30.11] That's not Mr. Fentress. That's one of his helpers. But most of our work is inside shown inside our building in Los Angeles where we do several different types of exhibits a year which relate to the immediate environment that are local to LA because we're there. So, some of them are sort of local regional ones. This one looked at how traffic is controlled in the city.
[00:22:55.37] We make these posters for most of our exhibits. So, that's what we're looking at here are these posters for some regional exhibits. Terminal island is an island in the port of LA, Long Beach, the biggest port in America. One of the biggest in the world, and it's this kind of amoebic looking structure which is kind of gobbling its way towards China with all those shipping containers coming in from the Orient to supply our consumer needs.
[00:23:22.19] And then, it regurgitates consumer products that have been compressed, and cardboard, the shipping container, shipping packaging that comes with things, which we send back to China, though a little less so in recent years once we've used up the new goods. So, we looked at terminal island in all of its different terminal behaviors that go on there, not just international shipping, but other stuff.
[00:23:49.04] LA DWP power was an exhibit all about electrical infrastructure. Down to earth was an exhibit about experimental airplane crash sites. It was about the history of jet aviation and Edwards Air Force Base, which is the birthplace of the right stuff in the jet age related to the space program, and where almost every interesting, dramatic jet aircraft development transpired there.
[00:24:20.21] And often, these things tragically fell to the ground in this realm of experimentation. And this exhibit looked at-- we worked with a guy who was the historian for the Dryden Flight Research Center and had access to all these videos and things that never been seen before that were just rotting away in a Quonset hut in Edwards. So what we did, of course, a bus tour to go visit the crash sites.
[00:24:45.17] This was about parking. Nah. Parking being what we all want to do with our cars, and what cars do for most of their life. So, I mean we, especially, out West have a very big, deep relationship with vehicles. And so, it seems that a lot of attention goes to the roads, and the design of vehicles, and things, but very little attention goes to parking, which is what cars actually do most of the time.
[00:25:15.53] So, we looked at parking, like why are parking spaces as wide as they are. How are they demarked? What does a wheel stop look like? Why is it shaped like that? And this-- we built a parking space in the middle of our exhibit that was a scale version of the one outside the Baja Fresh taco joint down the road.
[00:25:36.23] And so, we looked at parking garages, parking, parallel parking. Anyways, it was all about parking. Very boring, but exciting at the same time.
[00:25:47.03] But then, we also do exhibits that are regional about other places besides sort of extrapolating on Los Angeles. Yeah, this one looked at the end of the Mississippi River where it sort of falls apart into these fractal landscapes that are disappearing because of all kinds of things, mostly human generated.
[00:26:08.42] And we even did a show about Massachusetts for the MIT List Center years and years ago. Which was about 100 or so different places depicted and described. And we did a bus tour for that too. Went out to Harvard's observatory, where at that time the SETI program, the Search for Extraterristrial Intelligence were going on out there with a billion channel assay.
[00:26:33.78] It was a lot-- the exhibit and the tour was a lot about electromagnetic history. We went out to Lincoln Labs and Hanscomb Air Force Base, and a number of MIT radio astronomy sites and imaging sites.
[00:26:50.59] And then, a another region in the meadow lands we focused on for a printed tour leaflet, really a study of the meadow lands, and helping people navigate their way through it and to it.
[00:27:07.72] This is just a sample image of this amazing landscape outside New York City. And you poor New Yorkers, they don't have any landscapes, they just have architecture. But as soon as they go 10 minutes West into New Jersey this wonderful landscape opens up, the meadowlands, where all the sinews of urbanness are exposed, and the swamps, and the Pulaski Skyway flies over it all.
[00:27:30.51] So, we map this space as a kind of iconic, kind of antipode opposed to the cleanish urbanism, and then, the sort of more functional spaces that support and enable that urbanism, you know, the Meadowlands where staging, and logistics, and waste disposal, and Medieval Times, and all the important things that are sort of reflected back and forth between the certain intense urbanness of New York.
[00:28:01.56] And a place where people often began to think about landscape from New York, including Robert Smithson, who is an artist whose grave is in the foreground there, and actually overlooks the meadowlands and Medieval Times, the towers on the right there. And he did a famous tour of monuments of the Passaic River, and this is the Hackensack drainage, but they converge and meet at this wonderful place called Point-No-Point in Kearny, New Jersey.
[00:28:31.31] Anyhow, so this was all about that landscape. And you can, I think, still get our map at one place through our website or in the New Jersey Turnpike visitor centers where we try and keep them stocked and available for free.
[00:28:49.44] This is another kind of space related to kind of thematic space. An exhibit we did about the Canadian border with the US. A lot of attention goes to the Southern Mexican border, but the Canadian border is longer, and full of curiosities, then expressive things. Of course, it has no physical size. The line itself is infinitely small, but it creates a line as it goes through space by affecting landscape, trees, architecture, communities.
[00:29:26.08] Now, this is the cut line as they call it. Yeah, which is 10 feet on one side is managed by the US, and 10 feet on the other side managed by the Canadians. And when it goes through trees and forests it's like some kind of land art [INAUDIBLE] or something. So, we did an exhibit all about it, and we actually got the guy from the boundary commission for the US to come to talk about it.
[00:29:49.19] And he manages that cut line, that whole space 5,000 miles including the Alaska side. But we were focused for the exhibit, primarily, on the 48 state boundaries. We broke it down to these different chapters, and started in the East, just like America did. And started with the first thing that the border hits when it hits something. Comes in and out of the ocean and hits this bridge in Maine, where literally the international boundaries manifested as different paint, and different maintenance schedules on the bridge.
[00:30:26.90] And that line you know wanders through Maine in all kinds of crazy complex ways, and then, hits the 45th parallel in Vermont, and makes an interesting mess out of Derby, Vermont where it goes through actual buildings that were intentionally built on it. In North Dakota, there's the International Peace Garden with another wonderful metastasization portion of the border where this is the border looking due West, and there's two towers that are divided.
[00:30:55.80] This was prior to 9/11 too. It's kind of like 60s kind of celebration of the union of the two countries, and it's a really dramatic kind of evocation almost like a poetic expression of binaries of reflections of two things being shared, but also very slightly different.
[00:31:21.25] The park itself is a bubble in the border. You can go there without a-- You can be in Canada from the US without your passport or vise versa, but then you leave the parking if you go in the other country, you need it. But when you're in the park it, it straddles the border by several hundred acres, and you can be in the other country without any problem.
[00:31:43.74] And it divides through all kinds of curious structures in the park, including this organ which was built intentionally on the international boundary. And when you sit there and the organ, this is looking East, your left hand is in Canada, and your right hand is in the US when you play the organ. Anyhow, so that exhibit looked at all that kind of space.
[00:32:07.91] Hollowed earth, the underground business parks that are developed inside former, mostly former, limestone mines. The Subtropolis is maybe the most famous one near Kansas City. And there's, you know, lots of space underground that is developed and used in curious ways. And this was an exhibit that looked primarily at the sort of business park redevelopment. A lot of it, especially in the East coast is owned by Iron Mountain.
[00:32:39.90] And this is the original Iron Mountain, and incidentally in this location, in New York on the Hudson River. It was an iron mine for extracting iron for the iron foundries up in Troy. And then, it was marketed as post-nuclear place to put your corporate backup stuff by the mushroom farmer that owned the site in the 50s. And I think Standard Oil was one of his first tenants, and it still is used by corporate entities as a backup site.
[00:33:13.32] And Iron Mountain has a Boston based company, incidentally, has bought up a lot of the underground limestone mines that are been used for record storage. And but mostly Iron Mountain just shuffles papers around and shreds it and stuff in surface warehouses. But they do maintain a fairly significant collection of underground places including Boyers, Pennsylvania which is where the Bettmann Archive which became Corbis, and which is now Getty, with this great image database of the world is stored underground and processed.
[00:33:43.67] This looked at the 35 or so places across the country which were established over 200 years to anchor the ground to the map West of the original 13 colonies, which are all done by metes and bounds. The rest of the country was done with the Cartesian grid dropped over place nobody had ever really mapped before starting in the late 1700s, and all the way up until the 1950s in Alaska.
[00:34:10.79] Every time we signed a treaty or got land from the natives, or however we got it, or got land from Napoleon, the federal government would send surveyors out to establish an initial point to lock that entirety into mappable all space using that township and range, 36 square mile township and range system, which if you live in the west you're very aware of.
[00:34:38.16] It's why 2/3 of the country is North, South, East, West, you know, why there's these little squares everywhere is because they're locked into this grid. And these were the initial points of those initial federal land surveys that most of which have been supplanted by other more recent surveys, but when we've looked around to try and find where the old ones were, we found there were often interesting monumentizations of them for historical purposes.
[00:35:05.64] Like this is the one that anchors all of Arizona to the grid, and it's looking due East, and you can see how the land patterns are different now on one side and the other. So, it was an exhibit largely about surveying and how surveying works.
[00:35:24.60] This exhibit was about golf across America from Long Island to Pebble Beach. If it were one big golf course, America, it would be almost a mile wide coast to coast. You could play 500,000 holes of golf going across the whole country till your ball falls into the Pacific. And we turned the exhibit space into a putting green so people could experience that. It's only one out of five of us that ever played golf statistically.
[00:36:01.83] This was an exhibit about places that where uranium mining had gone on, and then the byproducts were left and then, ultimately contained, cleaned up, and then interned under these massively engineered shapes which range from rectangles to trapezoids. Of course, crushed rock and layers of clay that isolate these radioactive tailings, mostly, from the environment.
[00:36:32.43] So they're an attempt to create an architecture that transcends the mostly, at least individual lifetime. They really are probably last a couple hundred years, but they-- this is not a forever solution, even though the radioactivity will stay there for some time. But what it does is defer it. It kicks the can down the road I guess is what it does.
[00:36:56.43] And there's about 30 or 40 of these in different shapes and sizes around the West. Though there is also in Pennsylvania and other places in the Northeast. Though in those cases, they mostly put grass on them, and maintain them as using the soil and plants to help stabilize it. But out in the West, it's just as granulated, course, crushed rock creating a kind of carapace with controlled drainage.
[00:37:22.35] So, they are kind of like pyramids you know in a sense, even though they don't contain the pharaoh, legacy of the pharaohs, they contain the legacy of one of the most complicated and consumptive engineering projects, the nuclear industry itself. And so, it was a kind of dark show, I guess, looking at these various examples.
[00:37:51.16] American falls looked at urban waterfalls, and how they created some cities, and then were forgotten by the cities, and often rediscovered. They're sort of romantic industrial relics all re-engineered.
[00:38:06.57] And this exhibit looked at vehicular test tracks in America, which there are dozens. And they're sort of microcosms of car scapes. This looked at alternative energy, solar plants, the bigger mega scale ones. And starting 2011, there were incentives that really caused the boom in solar energy plants that created a massive amount of large industrial scale solar across the Southwest. Prior to that, there were really just three solar plants commercial in the US, and they were made in the 80s.
[00:38:50.87] This looked at steel production, former steel production sites.
[00:38:55.34] This one looked at the internet. On the ground, a lot of data centers.
[00:39:00.60] This looked at cold storage infrastructure. The way food moves through this cold chain. A lot of our exhibits are about windowless boxes in the suburbs, but that's kind of what America looks like in a lot of ways. That's where the real good stuff goes on.
[00:39:19.19] This looked at the way all the presidents have kind of, their legacies are formed to record their presidency, and where their birthplace, their death place, their library, whatever it is. This is one of Lincoln's cabins, I think, but it's in bronze, the ruins of the--
[00:39:44.45] This was about the railroad scape. But also it was about scale and magnitude. How the railroad changed the scale of the country. This year is the 150 anniversary of the golden spike, the first railroad to cross country. The nation was networked by that event, and became kind of industrially cohesive landscape.
[00:40:11.76] So, this exhibit looked at that, but also the model's version of it. So, as if the whole country were a railroad layout at a one to one scale. We looked at the small scale, or actually large scale, the iterations of the monuments of this railroad, Earth-railroad landscape. Complicated thing, but anyways it was an exhibit about large and small railroads.
[00:40:40.28] Recently, we did an exhibit about targets in America. This was a Google Earth show, though we did a lot of groundwork for it too. It was a research project into the 55 or so impact ranges that are scattered around the US. Looking at also though at the whole notion of targeting and zeroing in and what targets are like as these bullseye targets.
[00:41:05.93] And how scanning the ground in Google Earth looking for bull's eyes is kind of like a bombardier flying over the landscape looking for the right place to bomb. And they range from Florida, North Carolina, and, you know, they're not just in the West, they're all over. And you start thinking of Sir Jasper Johns and things as you go through these. They're quite beautiful.
[00:41:29.54] I'm almost done with this idea of just a very broad overview of where we're coming from. The ground our food eats was a show about NPK. You know, if anybody does any gardening understands the three principal elements of fertilizer. And nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash.
[00:41:54.95] And it turns out that we import most of that stuff, but a lot of it is produced internally. In fact, since all the food we eat, like more than 90% of the food Americans eat, is done through industrial agriculture that's fed by the fertilization of industrial fertilizers. In a way, when we eat a vegetable, we're eating the farm product, but we're really kind of eating the nutrients that went into that field that then fed that plant or fed that cow.
[00:42:33.25] So, if you follow the food chain, you know, way back to its source, if you source your food, it's not the farm, it's the places where the fertilizer came from. So, literally we're geophagists, eating the Earth as we eat food. And this image is one of the more transformed places in Florida where 75% of the phosphates using industrial agriculture in America come from just this 40 mile wide stretch outside Tampa where the Mosaic corporation has been extracting phosphorus for a long time.
[00:43:12.79] Most of the nitrogen, that's the N in the NPK, comes from gas plants. This is the biggest nitrogen production plant in Louisiana. CF Industries. And this is a potash plant. Now, these are the evaporation ponds. The mine itself is deep underground, so that doesn't make a good picture. But when it's brought out from these underground solution mines where they run water through the mine to extract the potash, and pump it to the surface, and then evaporate it out.
[00:43:48.39] They use these dramatic colors, actually pigment the ponds to accelerate the evaporation process. And that's real color, I mean we shot this with a drone. That's what it looks like.
[00:43:59.85] Currently, on view we have this exhibit about helium. Helium is a thing that seems a strange thing to talk about from land use point of view because it has no substance, really it's the second lightest gas. It just wants to get out. It just want to go to space. It wants to get away. It is invisible. It's odorless.
[00:44:18.96] But yet, it is everywhere. It's one of the most prolific elements. It's everywhere except in the atmosphere because it's either in the ground, or it's on its way into outer space. So, we capture it to make balloons, and blimps, and things. We also use a lot of it, most of it these days, as a coolant for MRI machines and other imaging because it has very low boiling point, one of the lowest.
[00:44:43.93] So, we looked at the physical infrastructure of helium where it comes from, and where it goes. And almost all of it for years, and years, came from Amarillo, Texas where there's a giant federal helium reserve which has now been auctioned off to three helium companies.
[00:45:02.70] This exhibit was our kind of first foray institutionally into the industrial gas world, which is one that is full of surprises. And this is one of just a handful, really six or eight large helium plants in the US that process helium from natural gas and turn it into usable helium. And then, we looked at the blimp scape from the pre-World War II to the World War II period to the current period of blimps being used as surveillance platforms, tethered aerostats along the US-Mexican border, for example.
[00:45:41.10] But, that's not what I came to talk about. I came to talk about museums, and in a way, I have been. But our investigations into land use all across the country, we come across all kinds of museums, and most of them fall into our cultural category of land use.
[00:46:07.97] When we did our executive decisions exhibit, for example, we found out just about every president has a museum. And then, there's museums for just about all the famous American historical figures out there. And there's museums for the rest of us too, when we go.
[00:46:33.21] Now, there's museums for cartographic features of the nation. Museums for the fencing that won the West. Museums for the borders that keep us separated. There's museums about the bounty of our agricultural land. There is museums for the ingenious farm implements we've devised many, many of those kinds of museums. Museums are logging.
[00:47:12.68] Museums about just about every kind of food you could imagine, maple syrup too popcorn, and every kind of meat, and potato. Museums of Natural History, which are the progeny of the earliest forms of museums are common. We're in one now, I think.
[00:47:38.49] But they come in all forms, some wilder than others. Though mostly museums across the land are of unnatural history of all sorts that now abound across the country. Extractive industries have their own museum pantheon including salt, iron, phosphates, sulfur, dimensional stone, and even ethnic mining, and I imagine you'll find out what that is when you go inside the museum.
[00:48:26.59] Suitable for a nation that runs on gas, there are dozens of oil museums, starting with this the first oil well in America, which should and is a truly industrial sacred site. There are several offshore oil museums on oil rigs, as well there should be.
[00:48:44.84] Renewable energy is represented by at least a dozen windmill museums scattered over the countryside as well as visitor center like museums inside things like dams, and nuclear energy complexes, and other energy facilities. National industriousness is represented in industrial museums across the land even often emerging out of local concentrated forms of industry like this project which is a big industrial history museum on the grounds of the old steel mill at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, most of which is now a Casino.
[00:49:26.91] Another industriousness museum, the Precision Machining Museum , American Precision Museum in Windsor, Vermont. Gun museums, lock museums, not too many of those. Sanitary plumbing museums. I think this in Worcester, I don't know if anyone has been to it recently.
[00:49:52.79] And in the communications and film industries, there's museums of film locations. TV museum, this is one of few, I think that might even be the only real team museum about TV, the appliances, not TV, the Philo Farnsworth Museum in Idaho.
[00:50:21.82] There's telephone museums, which are disappearing, of course. I don't think there's any cell phone museums that I've come across yet. Lots of computer museums and more, and more, there used to be very few, really shockingly few, but now there's a few more. Cryptology museums are kind of hard to find.
[00:50:51.43] [LAUGHTER]
[00:50:54.83] Electromagnetic Museums, and this is right next to the NSA, there are few and far between. There are all kinds of transportation museums including hundreds of train museums, lots of truck and car museums, and even a few bus museums. There are many ships turned into museums. Museum's about shipping and several ship-wreck museums, especially in the upper Great Lakes.
[00:51:32.44] And there's about just under a dozen, I'd say, submarine museums in the US on land. Diving museums, more than you might think, fortunately, this is a fascinating museum incidentally in Florida, which has SeaLab and all kinds of stuff.
[00:51:56.00] And there are an abundance of air museum covering every part of the land from West to the middle, to the East, and from the regional, to the local, from well supported large scale aerospace museums to small scale do it yourself aerospace museums.
[00:52:25.53] Some of the most interesting museums are next to military bases where they serve as public outreach centers for places that otherwise restrict entry where products of the military-industrial complex are explained or not, where entire histories of submerged technologies are alluded to if not revealed. When the atomic weapons production complex spanned the nation, as does its museum complex now, including the Bradbury Science museum and its origins on the Wizards Mesa, Los Alamos.
[00:53:07.05] The National Museum of Nuclear Science and Industry is located in Albuquerque outside the gates of Sandia National Lab, the nonprofit engineering entity that designed all of our nuclear weapons and still does today. The Atomic Testing Museum is in Las Vegas 60 miles from the Nevada test site, which is likely the most exploded place on earth in terms of cumulative mega-tonnage. The museum was built by the Department of Energy by the test site contractors Bechtel and EG&G on the grounds of the Desert Research Institute.
[00:53:42.60] The museum represents some kind of apotheosis of the museum concept visitors center for annihilation. America's ultimate foreign policy, when all else fails, kind of an anti-museum. The atomic testing museum is an affiliate of the Smithsonian, which is, of course, the main museum in America. Though it has affiliates across the land, the Smithsonian itself is mostly clustered in one place, on the great national nightus, the Mall of America at the national capital where America converges and emanates.
[00:54:28.29] Like the CLUI itself, the Smithsonian has themes expressed by its museums ringing the mall natural history, American history, air and space, American Indian, arts and industries building, Portrait Gallery, postal museum, the castle, which is what this is, the historic administrative center for the Smithsonian is a kind of meta-museum about the museum of museums of America.
[00:55:00.33] And beyond its formidable collections, architecture and metrics, the Smithsonian is interesting from a land use point of view because of the primacy of its location on the mall nestled in with the edifices housing other functions of government, and national interest, and identity, such as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, and all the monuments to dead presidents and war.
[00:55:36.15] These features of the mall are indexical nodes representing the categorized forms of activity that take place across the American land, the landscape that we all share and that defines us. Revelation is embedded in the artifacts, large and small, that are fixed in their place on this common ground all that open to interpretation and curation by us, by you, by anyone, and where admission is hopefully always free, at least on the outside, even if some of it's not always open to the public. So, I'll stop there. Thank you very much.
[00:56:20.75] [APPLAUSE]