Day 104: Falling into exposure

Yves doing his own leap into the void. Met Museum

There are reasons that the first ART + ENVIRONMENT conference will take place in Nevada. This is a landscape of myth, imagination, remoteness, geologic wonder--and monumental history. Nevada's very real, embodied, and complicated history continues into the present with a force of heat that attracts us, excites us, excludes us, and pushes us to seek shelter. Ultimately, it is a landscape of extreme exposure. Nevada's landscape is tightly partitioned into vast expanses. These zones have been released to take the form of playgrounds/wastelands for the atomic age, counter cultural events in our present era, and the ongoing space of mystery that manifests only where vastly remote stretches of land exist. Its topography varies between cavernous pits carved by the minds of science and the sculpted flat playas baring a trace of time that bends human comprehension. In short, humans come to this place to be closer to what exceeds them. Nevada is the epitome of what happens when landscape meets projected imaginations of science, government and art--drawing them into close relation until the point of implosion. Its deeply regulated, controlled and contaminated grounds become fertile for radical invention, response, and creative innovation, demanding that fields of inquiry cross- contaminate in order to survive. It is from here that we embark on Testing Ground.

See you in Reno!