Meaning is received by all the senses (including the haptic sense of body structure and pos-tures), by the mind, and is probably more felt than understood. It does not have precise meanings, but rather, flickers of, bundles of, even a mosaic of meanings. No absolutely direct translation into language is possible, or even appropriate. Places speak in another way. Appendix F: Team A Report (Marker Development Panel at Sandia National Laboratories)

I used to speak three languages: Russian, Hebrew, and English. Or rather I used to have three distinct ways of knowing, of naming, of speaking history through time. Since com-ing to Canada as a child, I lost one and a half ways of knowing, and gained another not quite back at two but almost there. I do not envy language for it is tasked with a difficult ne-gotiation of time and matter, a gathering together of changing phenomena and situating them temporally, of naming that state, its permutation, its rendering of matter to yet another ag-glomeration of matter. It is a process incongruous with deep time1 where even the seemingly immovable position of stars falter as they drift into deep space. But it is with this language that we must communicate with one another in times when bodies and their motions are not enough, when we are tasked with speaking out of our time into another, across the passage of deep time.

1 A term coined by James Hutton to describe geological time. (Palmer)

SPEAKING TO THE FUTURE: A NUCLEAR SEMIOTICS PROPOSAL

The Changing Shape of the Big Dipper Over 100,000 YearsSource: Sandia Laboratory (Jastrow and Thompson, 1977)

FELIX KALMENSON

Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. Source: LANL / LANS under US Department of Energy

The practice of speak-ing across time is one that has doubtless a long history, with its remnants glimpsed in the leavings of our Neolithic fore-bears. In recent decades how-ever, the practice has gained a new sense of urgency in the study of nuclear semiotics, a field whose central purpose is to communicate the existential threat of nuclear contamination to future cultures, specifically 10,000 years in the future. The challenge is born in the under-standing that these cultures will most likely not share our current or past systems of lan-guage, architecture or symbol-ogy and may have fundamen-tally different ways of communicating. (To get a sense of this challenge it is important to remember that one of the oldest written languages cuneiform is only around 5,000 years old.) The field was developed in 1981 when a team of behavioural scientists, anthropologists, nu-clear physics and engineers convened under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy and Bechtel Corp. to research methods to prevent future access to the deep geological nucle-ar repository of Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The Human Interference Task Force, as they were termed, had to conceptualize the conveyance of three things: the first, that a message was in fact being conveyed; the second, of the danger of the material in a given location and the third, information about the dangerous substance. The challenge emerges in consideration of how to represent an object that is material but whose hazardous properties are immaterial, how to rep-resent the abstraction of the future possibility of death from something that is not seen?

Yucca Mountain Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/

This design challenge was also issued by the German academic journal Zeitschrift fr Semiotik in 1982 with public responses ranging from linguist Thomas A. Sebeoks proposition for the formation of an atomic priesthood, to the DNA encoding of atomic flowers by science-fiction author Stanislaw Lem. Sebeoks proposition was founded on the belief that institutions of specialized or sacred knowledge and the myths and rituals that they create are one of the most resilient and enduring aspects of culture and knowledge2. And that the formation of such an institutional body tasked with the carriage of the specialized knowledge of this site would be the most effective way to reproduce that knowledge. Likewise, French authors Paolo Fab-bri and Franoise Bastides proposal relied on the enduring power of myth, however circu-itously, involving the breeding of what they termed radiation cats3 who would change colour when approaching radioactively contaminated sites. Premised on the assumption that our long cohabitation with cats will continue into the future, these cats will serve as an indicator of changing environmental conditions, a phenomenon that would rely on its subsequent catalog-ing in myth and popular song as a carrier of meaning. Unfortunately these notions of myths, narratives and symbols as something that remains stable, is seriously put into question by the decontextualization paradigm that much internet culture has fomented, leaving the prob-able safety of a future generation in the hands of internet trolls. The proposal does however introduce several novel and fascinating notions, specifically the idea of body as message.

The use of the genome as a vessel for information, a sustained message, is one that was taken up in Sci-fi author Stanislaw Lems proposal, which suggested the genomic encoding of atomic flowers or information plants4, self-replicating organisms which would house a mathematical sequence in their DNA structure that would allude to the location, con-tent and all relevant information about the disposal site. This notion of DNA as a data packet that houses information and then replicates this data through time is a fascinating way to consider the genome and fundamental nature of being, as not being-in-itself but as being-for-another-time, a deferred purpose. DNA functions as an internal language, a language which speaks organisms into being, much as how Umberto Eco understands the framing of the biblical creation myth, as arising from an act of speech5 Let there be light. To Eco, the voice of God, is an interior illumination a language that although not translatable into any known idiom, is still, through a special grace or dispensation, comprehensible to its hearer.6 In this sense DNA functions as a perfect language, communicating the essential being of oneself to its progeny, speaking history through body-in-time.

This field of genetic communication is a ripe one that I hope to explore in greater detail in future projects but for the purposes of nuclear semiotics I feel that it has two fundamental flaws as a strategy for speaking through time. The first, it presumes a continuity of existing biosystems, positing not only the sustained presence of this particular cat or plant species in an age of mass extinction (brought upon by unprecedented anthropogenic climate change, overhunting, ect.) but also fundamentally misunderstands the foundational principles of evo-lution, change through time; premised on the flawed notion that a human-guided genetic cod-

2 (Eco 177)3 (Bastide)4 (Lem)5 (Eco 7)6 Ibid

ing would be immune to the experience of drastic change over millennia of shifting environ-mental and social conditions7. The second reason that these particular solutions are lacking is that they, as Eco notes, presuppose precisely the sort of social continuity that the original question had put into doubt.8 The whole field of nuclear semiotics has been developed along the assumption that there will exist radical if not complete ruptures between our current societies and those of the 10,000 year future, and to assume that an atomic priesthood, a myth of a cat, or an ability to correctly translate complex mathematically encoded DNA, ignores the point, because as radiation breaks down molecular structure, time break down narrative.

Following the initial studies by the Human Interference Task Force, the study of nu-clear semiotics was taken up in 1990 by the Marker Development Panel at Sandia National Laboratories in conjunction with the planned construction of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Notable contributors included artist Jon Lomberg who proposed a series of se-quential pictograms9 and landscape artist and architect Mike Brill who proposed a landscape of thorns to denote danger10. These proposals, like those previously mentioned, fail to get to the heart of the issue of speaking outside of the cultural imagination. For one Jon Lombergs assumes the sequential reading of his illustration would be top to bottom, an assumption which ignores a contemporary multitude of cultural conventions concerning directionality. Likewise, Mike Brills proposition, while surely satisfying his interest in conceptualizing angu-lar earthworks and land art, assumes that notions of what constitutes ominous will somehow remain fixed, or that this interesting arrangement will somehow not pique future-humans interest to further investigate instead of flee. We need look no further than the Pyramids of Giza whose function was to protect the entombed bodies of Pharaohs and communicate their sacredness, but whose very materiality, which indicated an attempt to exclude the bod-ies of others, in turn drew the curiosity, greed or desperation of looters. We dig things up and then read the sign on the door. The final result of the WIPP consultations and planning process was a rather lackluster design composed of 7.6m tall granite pillars arranged across the landscape in a radial composition with earthen walls, centered around a roofless granite room which sits atop the site11. The slabs and pillars that comprise the arrangement will be replete with warnings and information signs in Navajo and the six official languages of the UN12. To supplement this arrangement, a series of pictograms are being considered including a distillation of Edvard Munchs painting, The Scream13. Umberto Ecos response to these propositions highlights the continued inability to step outside of current frames, he notes:

It is curious to see that, having been presented with a choice of various types of universal language, the choice finally fell on a narrative solution, thus reproposing what really did happen millennia ago. Egyptian had disappeared, as well as any other perfect and holy primordial language, and what remains of all this is only myths, tales

7 There is also the question of how radiation will alter the carefully coded genome of these species.8 (Eco 177)9 (Trauth 261)10 (Trauth 130)11 (Trauth 207)12 (Trauth 134)13 (Trauth 203)

Tall Granite Monolith with Inscriptions Image: Jon LombergSource: Sandia National Laboratory

Image: Mike BrillSource: Sandia National Laboratory

without a code, or whose code has long been lost. Yet they are still capable of keeping us in a state of vigil in our desperate effort at decipherment.14

Indeed flipping through the 351 Page report released by the Marker Development Panel it is clear how much lessons from the past play into the structural formations of markers that can materially outlast time. But the researchers fail to regard how these places have interfaced with history, how the meanings that we now ascribe to these sites were themselves narrativ-ized under largely colonial pre/occupations. While speaking of these architectures as a natu-ral language15 in the abstract sense, one cannot fully grasp the original intentions of these structures and symbols, we can only rely on fields with problematic colonial histories like anthropology and archaeology to frame our reencountering of these moments of past time.

Umberto Eco, in his book The Search for the Perfect Language, speaks of how in the Bible the first task given to Adam is that of naming the creatures of the EarthHe brought

14 (Eco 177)15 (Trauth 130)

Source: Sandia Laboratory

them unto Adam to see what he would call them becoming the nomothete, the name-giver, the creator of language.16 This naming, did not bring the creatures into being for they had already been made17 it only served to bring them into the frame of Adams knowing, to speak them into a relation with the anthropos. One is to understand though that this naming, was performed in a unity of thought and speech, a Logos, a coexistence of both conditions18, in a perfect and universal a priori language that somehow speaks the being of things, a totalizing speech. And it was only a result of the construction and eventual collapse of the Tower of Ba-bel that humanity was cursed with the confounding of speech, with an erasure of that perfect language19. There is much historical debate as to whether or not this narrative represents a blight or an opportunity that has allowed for the emergence of a multiplicity of unique ways of seeing, organizing and interpreting the world20. Generally however, in western narratives this confounding has been regarded as the root of historical conflict21 while Arab scholars, such as Ibn Hazm, question whether the idea of the perfect language and the subsequent fracturing of languages are somehow independent events and concepts. He posits that this perfect language wasnt something that was completely other to our current understanding of language but was in fact just a language that included all others22. A counter-logic is presented in Ursula K. Le Guins Hanish Cycle where Mind Speech, a form of direct mind-to-mind communication, had resulted in the fall of galactic society because, as Le Guin sug-gests, between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. Between thought and sent-thought is no gap, they are one act, there is no room for the lie.23 Le Guin inverts the Babel narrative, positing that it is not in our mutual unknowing that the seeds of our conflict lie but instead it is in our inability to reconcile how that knowing functions within a nexus of needing and desiring.

The fundamental quandary however remains, as much foregrounding the limits of our ability to communicate across time as to relate in a way that is not presupposed by a shared system of relations, defined by cultural adjacencies. How to escape the essential formations of language that we all take for granted? For example, the orientation of the reader, the ability to perceive certain shapes as distinct from others, the very idea of message as visual. There is a growing body of research that has suggested that perception, remembrance, discrimina-tion, and encoding of stimuli are in part contingent on diverging linguistic systems24. With a recent study by Roberson et al noting that:

[] linguistic categorization in adults, appears isomorphic with cognitive representa-tion. Perceptual space appears to be distorted at the boundaries of color categories, so that, even when two languages have the same number of terms and those terms cluster around similar points in perceptual space, speakers of those languages show

16 (Eco 7)17 A deer does not care one calls it deer or reed.18 (Eco 10)19 (Eco 9)20 (Eco 345)21 (Eco 9)22 (Eco 352)23 (Le Guin 34)24 (Roberson 36)

Lascaux Lunar CalendarSource: lascaux.culture.fr

significant differences in their cognitive organization of color space25

And indeed this is something that is hard to reconcile in envisioning how to think outside of our linguistic frameworks and the way that they constitutes a unique model of the uni-verse26. Foundationally this is an issue in understanding how the technology of language functions like other technologies in serving to enframe, to give bounds to things. This di-lemma is a fundamental one stretching back to a time before planned societies. In the caves of Lascaux there exists what is thought to be the oldest lunar calendar, dating back 15,000 years, thatbased on modern interpretationsdepicts the daily cycles of the moon. What is striking about this calendar is how the artist/astronomer approached the depiction of the new moon, or rather the absence of moon. The artist chose to represent the absence by depicting an empty square, a shape with no reference in nature, a shape intrinsically tied to human ways of seeing, an enframing. The technology of mark-makingof paint to wall, of tools of markingintroduced a revolution in not only notions of representation but also

how these ideas of representation in turn transform ones experience of the represented thing. Oral techniques of naming were supplemented with visual techniques of naming and this naming codified a sequential ordering of the moons passage, fundamentally redefining its relationship with that society. The issue then becomes that if we accept this premise that technology fundamentally redefines our way of knowing, seeing and naming, then the expo-nential growth and change of technology in the past 10,000 years poses a problem. In the same way that it would be ludicrous for the artist from Lascaux to be expected to understand the reality of radiation and its restructuring of the molecular or the significance of Edvard Munchs The Scream on a granite pillar, it would likewise be impossible to imagine the way future humans or visiting aliens will understand our archaic scribblings. Our ways of speaking are always historically and conditionally situated, framed not only by language but also by ideology, technology, systems of power and their redefinitions of bodies in space-time.

In consideration of all these complexities, when I tasked myself with positing a solution to this communication problem I at once returned to the square, in an attempt to get back to

25 (Roberson 42)26 (Eco 338)

Derinkuyu Hidden Entrance UncoveredSource: thingshappendownhere/Flickr

as-close-to a fundamental process of naming as I can get. What is essentially expressed in this square? What I (I am here speaking from a set of embodied historical positions ie. white, Russian, Jewish male) gather is that if the fundamental method of drawing something from the abstract non-language of being-in-itself is to construct a frame, then perhaps the best way to bridge the obscurity of time and language is to merely acknowledge that very impos-sibility. To resign ourselves not to a framing of the abstract but to its opposite, to a hiding of the thing, to present or construct the appearance of the absence of things. This method borrows a page from the underground cities of Cappadocia in Central Anatolia, Turkey. Built initially by the Phrygians in the 7-8th BCE and later occupied and expanded by the Cappado-cian Greeks, this series of vast underground cities27 (Derinkuyu, the largest one housed up to 20,000 people) served to protect these societies from persistent waves of conquest and genocide28. The appearance of disappearance became a tactic of avoiding detection, an era-sure of the human imprint.

Drawing from these tactics of erasure I propose an attempt at a solution to the prob-lem of nuclear semiotics as an expansion of the field of Restoration Ecology29 the idea of re-creating an entire ecosystem, community, or landscape, complete with all its parts and processes30. The idea of complete ecocentric restoration, as opposed to meliorative land management, is a relatively new concept that emerged anecdotally in the mid 1930s. Aber and Jordan claim that it is then that Ted Sperry, an ecologist supervising a tall grass prairie restoration in Wisconsin, instructed the Civilian Conservation Corps crew to disassemble an old stone wall and rescatter the stones as they might have been left by retreating glaciers thirteen thousand years earlier.31 This process of repair and return would have to function in a more intensive way than simply a returning of rocks and would have to be a multidisci-plinary collaborative effort whereby specialists in fields of geology, forestry, zoology amoung others would collaboratively reconstruct a simulacra of the sites of Yucca Mountain or WIPP. This would involve for instance a covering of the entrances to the mines with the original earth/stone and a reinscription of erosion patterns, the markings of deep time. This process

27 Over 200 cities between Kayseri and Nevsehir (Wikipedia)28 From Muslim Arabs during the ArabByzantine wars (780-1180), the Mongolian incursions of Timur in the 14th century, and periodic waves of Ottoman persecution. (Wikipedia)29 A term coined by John Aber and William Jordan (Wikipedia)30 (Jordan III 17)31 Ibid

would involve initially a forensic investigation of the site both before and after the mining pro-cess, examining historical aerial and ground photo documentation and performing intensive field research in an attempt to reconstruct the scene.

As it happens neither the Yucca mountain nor the WIPP project inquiries have yet led to any actual built response to the nuclear semiotics design problem as both sites have experienced works stoppages, Yucca from environmental/legislative issues and WIPP from a leak that led to worker exposure to radiation. And it is this fact that perhaps the most level-headed proposal from Zeitschrift Fr Semiotik unpacks. In her proposal titled The problem is not just the answers, but the conditions Susanne Hauser, questions the ability of the deposi-tory structures to sufficiently safeguard against natural interference, and in lieu of such safe-guards that the further production of waste be ceased32. While the reinvigorated anti-nuclear movement post-Fukushima and the technology for the reprocessing of waste continues to develop, making a nuclear waste-free world theoretically possible, the questions that have arisen as a result of nuclear semiotics persist. If not to communicate an apology or warning concerning our present misdeeds, what else could we or should we speak to the future? And in developing this program for speaking to the future we must problematize the predomi-nately western framing of past communications and consider a multiperspectival approach that includes different ways of knowing.

32 (Hauser)

Bibliography

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