What is it?
This artwork seamlessly blends fragments of Sandia National Laboratory’s “Passive Institutional Controls” architectural design guide for the “Waste Improvement Pilot Plant” nuclear storage facility with portions of the U.S. legal code’s Title 28.
These two documents are both examples of exclusionary design:
- a design guide for nuclear storage; architecture intended to keep people away from nuclear waste for 10,000 years
- the laws governing the charging of fees for electronic access to the actual laws of the United States (through PACER); a system intended to keep people away from reading the laws that govern them
I feel there are many good reasons to be able to freely read laws, and not a lot of good reasons to access nuclear waste! So the parallels and contrasts to be drawn with these two federally designed systems for keeping people out are interesting to me.
This artwork changes speeds periodically as it streams fluidly through mashed-up slurries of these source texts. Viewers may open the box for a widescreen firehose reading experience. It may react to viewer presence by illuminating the screen with an eerie blue-green backlight.