GEOLOGIC TURN symposium
The Geologic Turn: Architecture's New Alliance
A Symposium Curated by Etienne Turpin
Jan. 10 + Feb. 10-11, 2012
All video recordings are now available; please follow the links on the names of the speakers to the
Taubman College vimeo page.
Click here for the A1 event poster.
INTRODUCTION
Recent research and practice in the fields of architecture, art, and philosophy suggest the increasing influence of geology with the design disciplines, visual arts, and theoretical humanities. The symposium The Geologic Turn: Architecture’s New Alliance, curated by Etienne Turpin, Ph.D., as part of the Sanders Research Fellowship at the Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, University of Michigan, bring together researchers, scholars, and practitioners whose work is at the center of this fecund transdisciplinary trajectory. The objectives of the symposium are to encourage new productive connections among current scholarship and practice, and to expose this new transdisciplanary research to Taubman College for discussion and debate.
The symposium is generously supported by the Sanders Fellowship at Taubman College and the Institute for the Humanities of the University of Michigan. All events are free and open to the public. Lunch will be provided in the studio space during the break on Saturday.
The symposium is generously supported by the Sanders Fellowship, Taubman College, and the Institute for the Humanities of the University of Michigan.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
_________________________
Friday, February 10, 06:00 PM
Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain
Stan Allen (Princeton University School of Architecture)
A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104)
TCAUP
A1 event poster is available here.
Description
Green roofs, artificial mountains and geological forms; buildings you walk on or over; networks of ramps and warped surfaces; buildings that carve into the ground or landscapes lifted high into the air: all these are commonplace in architecture today. New technologies, new design techniques and a demand for enhanced environmental performance have provoked a re-thinking of architecture’s traditional relationship to the ground. Some of today’s most innovative buildings no longer occupy a given site but instead, construct the site itself. Landform Building sets out to examine the many manifestations of landscape and ecology in contemporary architectural practice: not as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon (architects working in the landscape) but as new design techniques, new formal strategies and technical problems within architecture.
Biography
Stan Allen became the dean of Princeton University in 2002. He is a practicing architect and principal of SAA/Stan Allen Architect. From 1989–2002, he taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he was also the Director of the Advanced Design Program. After working for Richard Meier and Partners in New York and Rafael Moneo in Spain, he established his own practice in 1990. His built work to date includes galleries, gardens, workspaces and a number of innovative single-family houses. Responding to the complexity of the modern city in creative ways, Stan Allen has developed an extensive catalogue of urbanistic strategies, in particular looking at field theory, landscape architecture and ecology as models to revitalize the practices of urban design. His urban projects have been published in Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, reissued in 2004) and his theoretical essays in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, reissued in 2008 by Routledge. Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, a 450 page book based on the conference held at the School in 2009, was published by Lars Muller in 2011.
From 1999–2003 he worked in collaboration with James Corner/Field Operations. The work of this interdisciplinary collaboration was recognized with first prizes in invited competitions for the re-use of Fresh Kills in Staten Island (2001), and the Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, California (2002). In 2000 they won the competition for a garden at the French Consulate in New York (now complete), and were finalists in the competition for the 320-acre Downsview Park in Toronto. In 2007, SAA/Stan Allen Architect won the international competition for the redesign of the Taichung Municipal Airport in Taiwan, which is now being implemented. Recently completed buildings include the Sagaponac House, Salim Publishing at Paju Book City and the CCV Chapel in the Philippines. The firm has recently been recognized with P/A Awards for the Taichung Airport and the Yan Ping Waterfront in Taipei, AIA Awards for the CCV Chapel and Salim Publishing, and an Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The recently completed Taichung InfoBox won both AIA andP/A Awards. In addition to design awards and competition prizes, he has been awarded Fellowships in Architecture from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, a Design Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Graham Foundation Grant, a President's Citation and the 2009 John Hejduk Award from The Cooper Union. In a ceremony held in New Orleans in May, Allen was elevated to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects.
_______________________________________
Saturday, February 11th, 10:00AM - 04:00 PM
All sessions
A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104)
TCAUP
Immanent Histories 10.00-11:30 AM
Seth Denizen (UVa)
Jane Hutton (Harvard GSD)
Amy Catania Kulper (TCAUP)
Discussion moderated by Meredith Miller (TCAUP)
Documenting a series of erratic boulders that were first deposited at the toes of the retreating Late-Wisconsin ice sheets, Harvard GSD Assistant Professor Jane Hutton will consider the role of glacially distributed rocks in instigating popular conceptions about the continuum between human and geological action; Seth Denizen, currently Master of Landscape Architecture candidate at the University of Virginia where his thesis research studies the anthropogenic soils of New York City and their disturbing taxonomies, will then consider the temporal and aesthetic dimensions that made modern geology empirically sensible and suggest a correlative proposal for the Anthropocene; and, Taubman College Assistant Professor Amy Kulper will then discuss research from her current book project Immanent Natures: The Laboratory as Paradigm for Architecture’s Experimental Practices, and consider the geologic in the writings of Viollet, Semper, and Ruskin. The panel, moderated by Taubman College Assistant Professor Meredith Miller of milligram office, seeks to track the geologic turn as part of a long and immanent history within which design research explores the precarity of its own foundations.
Making the Geologic Now 11:30-01:00 PM
Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth
of smudge studio
Discussion moderated by Rosalyne Shieh (TCAUP)
Description
In this session, smudge studio collaborators Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth will announce early sightings of an emergent and expanding cultural sensibility: the increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for understanding and responding to conditions of the present moment. Recent natural and human-made events triggered by or triggering the geologic have made volatile earth forces sense-able and relevant with new levels of intensity. Artists, designers, architects, and cultural producers have begun to explore and creatively respond to the geologic depth of "now." smudge will trace some of these developments, and present their own work as a test site for what might become thinkable or possible if we humans were to collectively take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer—as our partner in designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences. The panel will be moderated by Taubman College Assistant Professor Rosalyne Shieh of SCHAUM/SHIEH.
Hard and Soft Evidence 02:30-04:00PM
D. Graham Burnett (Department of History, Princeton University)
Edward Eigen (Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY/CUNY)
Paulo Tavares (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths)
Discussion moderated by Rania Ghosn (TCAUP)
Description
Professor Edward Eigen, who is currently preparing to publish An Anomalous Plan, a book which discusses the development of laboratory spaces in nineteenth-century France, will begin with a discussion of the false bottom of historical geology; Paulo Tavares, an architect and urbanist from Brazil, will consider how, as the Earth enters the legal arena, the scientific and documentary techniques employed to mediate its testimony appear as sites through which the construction of historical-political narratives are disputed; and, D. Graham Burnett, historian of science and editor of Cabinet magazine, will then consider, in response to these presentations, the epistemological horizon as it is apportioned between scientific investigation and design research. This panel will be moderated by Taubman College’s Assistant Professor Rania Ghosn, whose research on Landscapes of Energy can be found in New Geographies.
A1 event poster is available for download here. A very special thanks to Captains of Industry for the poster design, and to Sara Dean and Scott Sorli for design, support, promotion, and logistics.
Signal-Return Books + Prints 10:00AM-04:00PM
We are very lucky to have Maia Asshaq of Signal-Return joining us at TCAUP with a table of selected books and publications by our symposium speakers, as well as the latest books and artist projects from Signal-Return, and the most delicious and original poster prints in the Middle West. If you are in Detroit's Eastern Market, please stop in for a visit to their beautiful new print shop. And, make sure to visit Maia at the Geologic Turn, next to the A+A Auditorium.
Signal-Return in Detroit's Eastern Market. Images courtesy of Studio Couture Detroit.
_________________________
MORE INFORMATION
With publications such as Smudge Studio’s Geologic City: a field guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York, and their current exhibition Thingness of Energy, as well as Stan Allen and Marc McQuade’s edited collection Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain, and Peter Galison’s forthcoming Building Crashing Thinking, it is clear that a productive new alliance among geological research, the visual arts, science and technology studies, and the design disciplines is under construction. The symposium aims to clarify three lines that inform this geological alliance: historical scholarship, theoretical inquiry, and contemporary practice. Of course, these three lines are sometimes quite productively tangled, and the symposium participants have all been invited for their unique abilities to entangle research, theory and practice, and thereby produce important hybrid models for contemporary scholarship.
In order to avoid the false claims of novelty, the relations among architecture, landscape, and geology will be discussed in their historical context (Jane Hutton, Seth Denizen, Amy Kulper, Meredith Miller). The theoretical component of current affinities between science and design research, and their potential relation to the Anthropocene, will comprise a second line of discussion (Edward Eigen, D. Graham Burnett, Paulo Tavares, Rania Ghosn). The third line of inquiry regarding contemporary practice would take up geologic commitments through a discussion of current practices in architecture and landscape architecture (Stan Allen), the visual arts and cultural production (Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse of smudge studio), and the history of science (Peter Galison).
For more information about the Symposium, to receive email updates, or for a poster or mailer with additional details, please contact sturpin (at) umich (dot) edu.
_________________________
ON THE ANTHROPOCENE
In 2002, the chemist Paul Crutzen coyly suggested to a group of fellow scientists that our current geological epoch should be renamed the Anthropocene to reflect the decisive impact humans have on their environment, including its geological features. Following Crutzen’s comments and a paper published the same year in the journal Nature, the Anthropocene began to circulate within hydrospheric, biospheric, and pedospheric research and their attendant scientific publications. However, it was not until 2007, when the British stratigrapher, Jan Zalasiewicz, then serving as the
chair man of the Geological Society of London’s Stratigraphy Commission, asked his colleagues about the merit of the term that it began to register as a formal geological question. While the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) continue to debate the relevant scientific merits of this diachronic shift, in the visual arts, theoretical humanities, and architecture and landscape architecture we have witnessed a turn to the
geologic.
_________________________
PAST EVENTS
Tuesday, January 10, 06:00 PM
Introductory Lecture
Wastelands and Wilderness
Peter Galison
A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104)
TCAUP
Description
As they are usually understood, the designations "nuclear wasteland" and "pure wilderness" are opposites; when they converge we often describe this circumstance as "paradoxical" or "ironic." Taking stock of plans to handle lands that will remain saturated with radionuclides for tens of thousands of years, I argue that the categories of wastelands and wilderness are far from dichotomous; that their relation is far more intriguing than a binary of purity and corruption. Removing parts of the earth in perpetuity - for reasons of sanctification or despoilment - alters a central feature of the human self, presenting us in a different relation to the physical world, and raising irreducible questions about who we are when land can be classified, forever, as not for us humans.
Images from SANDIA Report
Expert Judgment on Inadventent Intrusion into the Waste Isolate Pilot Plant
Biography
Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. His work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of physics -experimentation, instrumentation, and theory, focusing on the role of visualization and materiality in scientific work. Among his books are: How Experiments End (1987), Image and Logic (1997), Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps (2003), and, with L. Daston, Objectivity (2007). Among other co-edited volumes are Big Science; The Disunity of Science; The Architecture of Science; Picturing Science, Producing Art; Scientific Authorship; and Einstein for the 21st Century. To explore the relation of scientific work with larger issues of politics, he has made two documentary films: with Pam Hogan, "Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma" (2000) and, with Robb Moss, "Secrecy" (about national security secrecy and democracy), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. At present, he is completing a book, Building Crashing Thinking (on technologies that re-form the self) and has just begun a new documentary film project on the long-term storage of nuclear waste, “Nuclear Underground.”
Professor Galison’s recent interview with smudge studio on secrecy and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Carlsbad, New Mexico, is available here.
A Symposium Curated by Etienne Turpin
Jan. 10 + Feb. 10-11, 2012
All video recordings are now available; please follow the links on the names of the speakers to the
Taubman College vimeo page.
Click here for the A1 event poster.
INTRODUCTION
Recent research and practice in the fields of architecture, art, and philosophy suggest the increasing influence of geology with the design disciplines, visual arts, and theoretical humanities. The symposium The Geologic Turn: Architecture’s New Alliance, curated by Etienne Turpin, Ph.D., as part of the Sanders Research Fellowship at the Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, University of Michigan, bring together researchers, scholars, and practitioners whose work is at the center of this fecund transdisciplinary trajectory. The objectives of the symposium are to encourage new productive connections among current scholarship and practice, and to expose this new transdisciplanary research to Taubman College for discussion and debate.
The symposium is generously supported by the Sanders Fellowship at Taubman College and the Institute for the Humanities of the University of Michigan. All events are free and open to the public. Lunch will be provided in the studio space during the break on Saturday.
The symposium is generously supported by the Sanders Fellowship, Taubman College, and the Institute for the Humanities of the University of Michigan.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
_________________________
Friday, February 10, 06:00 PM
Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain
Stan Allen (Princeton University School of Architecture)
A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104)
TCAUP
A1 event poster is available here.
Description
Green roofs, artificial mountains and geological forms; buildings you walk on or over; networks of ramps and warped surfaces; buildings that carve into the ground or landscapes lifted high into the air: all these are commonplace in architecture today. New technologies, new design techniques and a demand for enhanced environmental performance have provoked a re-thinking of architecture’s traditional relationship to the ground. Some of today’s most innovative buildings no longer occupy a given site but instead, construct the site itself. Landform Building sets out to examine the many manifestations of landscape and ecology in contemporary architectural practice: not as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon (architects working in the landscape) but as new design techniques, new formal strategies and technical problems within architecture.
Biography
Stan Allen became the dean of Princeton University in 2002. He is a practicing architect and principal of SAA/Stan Allen Architect. From 1989–2002, he taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he was also the Director of the Advanced Design Program. After working for Richard Meier and Partners in New York and Rafael Moneo in Spain, he established his own practice in 1990. His built work to date includes galleries, gardens, workspaces and a number of innovative single-family houses. Responding to the complexity of the modern city in creative ways, Stan Allen has developed an extensive catalogue of urbanistic strategies, in particular looking at field theory, landscape architecture and ecology as models to revitalize the practices of urban design. His urban projects have been published in Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, reissued in 2004) and his theoretical essays in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, reissued in 2008 by Routledge. Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, a 450 page book based on the conference held at the School in 2009, was published by Lars Muller in 2011.
From 1999–2003 he worked in collaboration with James Corner/Field Operations. The work of this interdisciplinary collaboration was recognized with first prizes in invited competitions for the re-use of Fresh Kills in Staten Island (2001), and the Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, California (2002). In 2000 they won the competition for a garden at the French Consulate in New York (now complete), and were finalists in the competition for the 320-acre Downsview Park in Toronto. In 2007, SAA/Stan Allen Architect won the international competition for the redesign of the Taichung Municipal Airport in Taiwan, which is now being implemented. Recently completed buildings include the Sagaponac House, Salim Publishing at Paju Book City and the CCV Chapel in the Philippines. The firm has recently been recognized with P/A Awards for the Taichung Airport and the Yan Ping Waterfront in Taipei, AIA Awards for the CCV Chapel and Salim Publishing, and an Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The recently completed Taichung InfoBox won both AIA andP/A Awards. In addition to design awards and competition prizes, he has been awarded Fellowships in Architecture from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, a Design Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Graham Foundation Grant, a President's Citation and the 2009 John Hejduk Award from The Cooper Union. In a ceremony held in New Orleans in May, Allen was elevated to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects.
_______________________________________
Saturday, February 11th, 10:00AM - 04:00 PM
All sessions
A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104)
TCAUP
Immanent Histories 10.00-11:30 AM
Seth Denizen (UVa)
Jane Hutton (Harvard GSD)
Amy Catania Kulper (TCAUP)
Discussion moderated by Meredith Miller (TCAUP)
Documenting a series of erratic boulders that were first deposited at the toes of the retreating Late-Wisconsin ice sheets, Harvard GSD Assistant Professor Jane Hutton will consider the role of glacially distributed rocks in instigating popular conceptions about the continuum between human and geological action; Seth Denizen, currently Master of Landscape Architecture candidate at the University of Virginia where his thesis research studies the anthropogenic soils of New York City and their disturbing taxonomies, will then consider the temporal and aesthetic dimensions that made modern geology empirically sensible and suggest a correlative proposal for the Anthropocene; and, Taubman College Assistant Professor Amy Kulper will then discuss research from her current book project Immanent Natures: The Laboratory as Paradigm for Architecture’s Experimental Practices, and consider the geologic in the writings of Viollet, Semper, and Ruskin. The panel, moderated by Taubman College Assistant Professor Meredith Miller of milligram office, seeks to track the geologic turn as part of a long and immanent history within which design research explores the precarity of its own foundations.
Making the Geologic Now 11:30-01:00 PM
Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth
of smudge studio
Discussion moderated by Rosalyne Shieh (TCAUP)
Description
In this session, smudge studio collaborators Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth will announce early sightings of an emergent and expanding cultural sensibility: the increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for understanding and responding to conditions of the present moment. Recent natural and human-made events triggered by or triggering the geologic have made volatile earth forces sense-able and relevant with new levels of intensity. Artists, designers, architects, and cultural producers have begun to explore and creatively respond to the geologic depth of "now." smudge will trace some of these developments, and present their own work as a test site for what might become thinkable or possible if we humans were to collectively take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer—as our partner in designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences. The panel will be moderated by Taubman College Assistant Professor Rosalyne Shieh of SCHAUM/SHIEH.
Hard and Soft Evidence 02:30-04:00PM
D. Graham Burnett (Department of History, Princeton University)
Edward Eigen (Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY/CUNY)
Paulo Tavares (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths)
Discussion moderated by Rania Ghosn (TCAUP)
Description
Professor Edward Eigen, who is currently preparing to publish An Anomalous Plan, a book which discusses the development of laboratory spaces in nineteenth-century France, will begin with a discussion of the false bottom of historical geology; Paulo Tavares, an architect and urbanist from Brazil, will consider how, as the Earth enters the legal arena, the scientific and documentary techniques employed to mediate its testimony appear as sites through which the construction of historical-political narratives are disputed; and, D. Graham Burnett, historian of science and editor of Cabinet magazine, will then consider, in response to these presentations, the epistemological horizon as it is apportioned between scientific investigation and design research. This panel will be moderated by Taubman College’s Assistant Professor Rania Ghosn, whose research on Landscapes of Energy can be found in New Geographies.
A1 event poster is available for download here. A very special thanks to Captains of Industry for the poster design, and to Sara Dean and Scott Sorli for design, support, promotion, and logistics.
Signal-Return Books + Prints 10:00AM-04:00PM
We are very lucky to have Maia Asshaq of Signal-Return joining us at TCAUP with a table of selected books and publications by our symposium speakers, as well as the latest books and artist projects from Signal-Return, and the most delicious and original poster prints in the Middle West. If you are in Detroit's Eastern Market, please stop in for a visit to their beautiful new print shop. And, make sure to visit Maia at the Geologic Turn, next to the A+A Auditorium.
Signal-Return in Detroit's Eastern Market. Images courtesy of Studio Couture Detroit._________________________
MORE INFORMATION
With publications such as Smudge Studio’s Geologic City: a field guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York, and their current exhibition Thingness of Energy, as well as Stan Allen and Marc McQuade’s edited collection Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain, and Peter Galison’s forthcoming Building Crashing Thinking, it is clear that a productive new alliance among geological research, the visual arts, science and technology studies, and the design disciplines is under construction. The symposium aims to clarify three lines that inform this geological alliance: historical scholarship, theoretical inquiry, and contemporary practice. Of course, these three lines are sometimes quite productively tangled, and the symposium participants have all been invited for their unique abilities to entangle research, theory and practice, and thereby produce important hybrid models for contemporary scholarship.
In order to avoid the false claims of novelty, the relations among architecture, landscape, and geology will be discussed in their historical context (Jane Hutton, Seth Denizen, Amy Kulper, Meredith Miller). The theoretical component of current affinities between science and design research, and their potential relation to the Anthropocene, will comprise a second line of discussion (Edward Eigen, D. Graham Burnett, Paulo Tavares, Rania Ghosn). The third line of inquiry regarding contemporary practice would take up geologic commitments through a discussion of current practices in architecture and landscape architecture (Stan Allen), the visual arts and cultural production (Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse of smudge studio), and the history of science (Peter Galison).
For more information about the Symposium, to receive email updates, or for a poster or mailer with additional details, please contact sturpin (at) umich (dot) edu.
_________________________
ON THE ANTHROPOCENE
In 2002, the chemist Paul Crutzen coyly suggested to a group of fellow scientists that our current geological epoch should be renamed the Anthropocene to reflect the decisive impact humans have on their environment, including its geological features. Following Crutzen’s comments and a paper published the same year in the journal Nature, the Anthropocene began to circulate within hydrospheric, biospheric, and pedospheric research and their attendant scientific publications. However, it was not until 2007, when the British stratigrapher, Jan Zalasiewicz, then serving as the
chair man of the Geological Society of London’s Stratigraphy Commission, asked his colleagues about the merit of the term that it began to register as a formal geological question. While the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) continue to debate the relevant scientific merits of this diachronic shift, in the visual arts, theoretical humanities, and architecture and landscape architecture we have witnessed a turn to the
geologic.
_________________________
PAST EVENTS
Tuesday, January 10, 06:00 PM
Introductory Lecture
Wastelands and Wilderness
Peter Galison
A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104)
TCAUP
Description
As they are usually understood, the designations "nuclear wasteland" and "pure wilderness" are opposites; when they converge we often describe this circumstance as "paradoxical" or "ironic." Taking stock of plans to handle lands that will remain saturated with radionuclides for tens of thousands of years, I argue that the categories of wastelands and wilderness are far from dichotomous; that their relation is far more intriguing than a binary of purity and corruption. Removing parts of the earth in perpetuity - for reasons of sanctification or despoilment - alters a central feature of the human self, presenting us in a different relation to the physical world, and raising irreducible questions about who we are when land can be classified, forever, as not for us humans.
Images from SANDIA Report
Expert Judgment on Inadventent Intrusion into the Waste Isolate Pilot Plant
Biography
Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. His work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of physics -experimentation, instrumentation, and theory, focusing on the role of visualization and materiality in scientific work. Among his books are: How Experiments End (1987), Image and Logic (1997), Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps (2003), and, with L. Daston, Objectivity (2007). Among other co-edited volumes are Big Science; The Disunity of Science; The Architecture of Science; Picturing Science, Producing Art; Scientific Authorship; and Einstein for the 21st Century. To explore the relation of scientific work with larger issues of politics, he has made two documentary films: with Pam Hogan, "Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma" (2000) and, with Robb Moss, "Secrecy" (about national security secrecy and democracy), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. At present, he is completing a book, Building Crashing Thinking (on technologies that re-form the self) and has just begun a new documentary film project on the long-term storage of nuclear waste, “Nuclear Underground.”
Professor Galison’s recent interview with smudge studio on secrecy and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Carlsbad, New Mexico, is available here.