Artisode; 2.2; Bill Gilbert

I'm curious to know how many folks here are from that, I should say, live here in Albuquerque, do you mind just kind of raising your hand? Good, and people from who live in, say Santa Fe, all right, good. People live elsewhere in New Mexico. Ah, there's nowhere else in New Mexico. Well, we're going there. You know, when they said the bus tour, when they gave out the information, I really had no idea what it was going to be, and I thought, oh, great, I'll get some scenic kind of views, and I thought

I was going to go out and see some land art. That's weird because I was thinking about that during the tour. I was like, what is land art? Are these buildings really land art? I don't know if it's part of the program as an artist project that they wanted it to be kind of hush hush? I, that's a tough one. Because what I am is the director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. So I am a, I am an interpreter of landscape professionally. I look at places and tell you what I think. Yeah, it sort of peels back what we take for granted or what we expect to see when we look at the land. And I think it gets a lot weirder and a lot more interesting when you start to examine

it in a more precise way. Well, I studied geomorphology in school, which is the shape of the surface of the earth. I guess I sort of began straining from ideas of classic kind of geography and look towards interpreters of our position here on earth that were sort of outside of the normal views, people who often were artists. This whole tour in the project itself is an art piece and it's not that often that I get to be part of an actual art project. I started working on ideas with other people like became the Center for Land Use Interpretation. It was about creating methodologies to look at landscape in this way because it seemed like it should be done.

They would be disappointed but if they were thinking about their day in a very symbolic way it's really fascinating and the ideas keep percolating down the more I think about what we did and what was presented. I had the feeling that oh no, it's not really going to be about land art so then oh okay and it was only this morning that I knew that we were going to this place where they built the tombfong. Los Alamos was such a well-kept military secret that people outside them and hadn't project didn't even know it existed. Residents were forbidden to use the words Los Alamos. Post Office Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico, was the location listed for all Los Alamosans. It's interesting to see Los Alamos, I guess, not a huge fan of nuclear stuff. Los Alamos where we're going, where it all began really.

It's funny how often World War II becomes the kind of pivotal point between the past and the present. So in terms of the landscape of America, a lot of what you see is man-made and was made after World War II from, you know, think about petrochemicals and plastics, jet aviation, internet, space technologies, satellites in our states, the modern world. We knew the world would not be the same. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Los Alamos, I think it's one of the more interesting and compelling places in the country. I think it might be one of the most bizarre, startling, surreal, revealing, compelling, dramatic, kinetic places in the entire country because of what it represented, what they did there, what they do there too. The idea of an isolated environment in the middle of nowhere, I mean, with this sort of the high priests of science positioned up there to do this thing that had never been done before, the power of structure of the world was changed. At the end of nuclear testing in 1992, called for a new way of carrying out that mission.

Today, the lab is part of a program called Stockpile Stewardship, a national effort to ensure confidence in a U.S. nuclear deterrent. I think he's trying to say that it's our potential biggest impact as a species on the planet so far. I think he's started by saying there's no turning back and it's changed history and who we are as a species. Well, the reason why we're here is because I wanted to point out a nice point on the ground,

related to some of the work we're doing about in New Mexico. What happened here was a thermonuclear bomb fell out of an airplane in 1957 and it hit the ground right here and made a crater and exploded but it didn't go critical obviously because you would have heard about it. It would have taken out all of Albuquerque and maybe even some of Santa Fe, this was the biggest thermonuclear bomb we ever made. Yeah, this was one of over 30 broken-arrow incidents that have occurred. Those are accidents involving nuclear weapons where the weapon is destroyed but it doesn't go critical. But there's been, according to Department of Energy, 32 different broken-arrow incidents around the world.