Imagine this ruin, not as a monument, but as a message. Imagine this message as a marker system. Through this system the form conveys to us that: “This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.” But 5000 years later its full translation has been lost to time. Its message lays waste, perhaps forever to be misunderstood. So, I ask you then to continue to imagine:
Lost in Translation: Melissa Hollis
“This place is not a place of honour. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing is valued here.” What if, instead “this message is a warning about danger” ? What if this“danger is still present, in [our] time, as it was in [theirs]” ? What if the “danger is unleashed if this place is disturbed physically” ? All the while screaming to deaf ears that “this place is best shunned and left uninhabited.”
sTONE hENGE
So, lets us continue to imagine this alternate ‘stone henge’ today, where below the rubble of rocks, uncovers a burial place for nuclear waste. A non-monument to a future propose to of warning. This is happening now, somewhere in the New Mexico desert, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [WIPP] has been built to mark the earth, in one way or another, with a message intended to last forever... But it too will lay in waste, ready to ‘WIPP’ the future humanity hard if their message is lost. However, in the spirit of legal responsibility, the US government in 1990 charged a panel of independent experts with a task. A task to design a marker system to prevent human intrusion to the WIPP site, intended to be implemented future sites alike, for a period of Ten Thousand years.
sTONE hENGE OR sPACE oDESSY
To put this task in perspective, the physical form is to exceed beyond a time frame where others have obviously failed. Is it plausible to anticipate a future translatability of a site? Is it possible to design a message in the form of an ‘anti-monument’ ? One that will resist redundancy of time? Perhaps where “the medium is the message” This project called for an anthropologist, astronomer, archeologist, architect, linguist and material scientist to come together to tackle this exact issue.
Space Odessy 2001
They argued for a non-linguistic mode of communication, not rooted in any particular culture, so to remain unaffected by the expected transformations of cultures… A species-wide archetype … One that bonds to the form to the site itself. What is recommended is a substantial use of verbal texts, but with little emphasis on constructed, non-natural, non-iconic symbols.
To create an index across various message levels. Level 1 - for rudimentary information to show that ‘this is man-made’ Level 2 - as cautionary information to demonstrate ‘This is man made and dangerous’ Level 3 - for basic Information ‘What, Why, When, Where, by Whom’ and ‘How’ Level 4 - a complex collection of ‘Highly detailed records, tables, figures, graphs, and maps’ The idea is that the system is to work as a whole, favouring ‘beauty’ over ugliness in hope that it will be conserved. It also requires appropriation and foreignization of the object to resist time. It is an attempt to think of the original, universal, and generic language that is, or can be culturally embedded in an evolving culture. If this is at all possible? This is what is up for debate.
Space Odessy 2001