SPEAKING TO THE FUTURE

FELIX KALMENSON

The Changing Shape of the Big Dipper Over 100,000 Years
Source: Sandia Laboratory (Jastrow and Thompson, 1977)
I used to speak three languages, or rather I used to have
three distinct ways of knowing, of naming and of speaking
history through time. After my family's second migration, I
lost one and a half and gained another. Distance spatially,
but more importantly temporally, has wrenched speech
from its location in my mind. I do not envy language, for it is
tasked with a difficult negotiation of time and matter: a gath-
ering together of changing phenomena and situating them
temporally; of naming that state, its stasis, its permutation,
its rendering of matter into yet another agglomeration of
matter. It is a process incongruous with deep time1, where
even the seemingly immovable position of stars falters as
they drift in deep space. But it is with language, with this
system of meaning that we must communicate with one
another in times when bodies and their motions are not
enough when we are tasked with speaking out of our time
into another, across the passage of deep time.
When thought becomes speech, it becomes of time located
and situated within ourselves, extending outwards or
towards our centre or both or neither. We envision temporal-
ity and spatiality bound to our intrusion into spaces of mean-
ing. In this sense, meaning is physiological and contingent. It
is, for Trauth, received by all the senses (including the haptic
sense of body structure and postures)... and is probably
more felt than understood. It does not have precise mean-
ings, but rather flickers of, bundles of, even a mosaic of
meanings. No absolutely direct translation into language is
possible, or even appropriate.2 This gap in meaning is where
the poetic dwells and cultivates a conspiracy with the heart.
But how then are we to mobilise these frameworks of
communication in spaces in which the accurate translation
of a message is a matter of life or death? How can we
communicate essential information across time?
Places speak in another way.3
1. A term coined by James Hutton to describe the scale of geological time
(Gould, p. 2).
2. Trauth, p. 130.
3. Ibid.
4. Jones, p. 1.
Many before us have whispered into stones, have carved the
presence of knowledge, of empire, of systems of under-
standing into edifices meant to outlast the uttered word. In
recent decades however, this practice has gained a new
sense of urgency in the study of nuclear semiotics, a field
whose central purpose is to communicate, not an achieve-
ment but a fallout. Developed in response to the ecological
and design challenges posed in the managing of millions of
gallons of radioactive waste and thousands of tons of spent
fuel4 that have resulted from decades of weapons produc-
tion and nuclear power exploitation, nuclear semiotics has
emerged to bring language into the temporal scale of radio-
active decay a scale of 10,000-1,000,000 years. The field
was developed in 1981 when a team of behavioural scien-
tists, anthropologists, nuclear physicists and engineers
convened under the auspices of the US Department of
Energy and Bechtel Corp to research methods to prevent
access to the deep geological nuclear repository of Yucca
Mountain, Nevada by distant future cultures5 The Human
Interference Task Force, as they were termed, had to
conceptualise how to convey three things: the first, that a
message was in fact being conveyed; the second, the danger
of the material in a given location; and the third, specific
information about the dangerous substance. The challenge
is, and was for them, how to represent an object that is
material but whose hazardous properties are immaterial,
and how to represent the abstraction of the future possibility
of death from something that is unseen. As Chris Heaney
puts it: The nuclear waste is itself information; it communi-
cates time, through the regularity of decay, and danger,
through bodily harm... [T]he waste needs interpretation.6
The difficulty of the task is exacerbated by the likelihood that
the cultures that would encounter these artifacts, signage,
etc would not share our current or past systems of language,
architecture or symbology and may have fundamentally
different ways of communicating.7
This design challenge was also issued by the German
academic journal Zeitschrift fr Semiotik in 1982, with public
responses ranging from linguist Thomas A. Sebeoks propo-
sition for the formation of an atomic priesthood to the DNA
5. 10,000 years was decided as the maximum that could be expected.
6. Heaney, p. 659.
7. To get a sense of this challenge it is important to remember that one of
the oldest systems of writing cuneiform is only around 5,000 years old.
8. Eco, p. 177.
encoding of atomic flowers by science-fiction author Stani-
slaw Lem. Sebeoks proposition was founded on the belief
that institutions of specialised or sacred knowledge and the
myths and rituals that they create are the most resilient and
enduring aspects of culture and knowledge.8 The formation
of such an institutional body tasked with the carriage of the
specialised knowledge of this site would be the most effec-
tive way to reproduce that knowledge. Likewise, French
authors Paolo Fabbri and Franoise Bastides proposal
relied on the enduring power of myth, however circuitously,
involving the breeding of what they termed radiation cats
who would change colour when approaching radioactively
contaminated sites.9 Premised on the assumption that our
long cohabitation with cats will continue into the future,
these cats will serve as an indicator of changing environ-
mental conditions, a phenomenon that would rely on its
subsequent cataloguing in myth and popular song as a carri-
er of meaning. Unfortunately the notion that myths, narra-
tives and symbols remain stable throughout time is unten-
able. Furthermore, as Heaney notes: technological advanc-
es of the last century have seen a movement toward ever
faster and more easily accessible information devices and
media, but concomitant with speed and accessibility are the
threats of ephemerality, obsolescence, and atrophy. Infor-
mation today goes more places and does it quicker, but it is
in some ways more vulnerable to the ravages of time than
ever before.10 The proposal does however introduce several
novel and fascinating notions, specifically the idea of body as
message.
The use of genetic code as a vessel for information - a
sustained message - is one that was taken up in Lems
proposal, suggested the coding of the DNA of atomic
flowers or information plants, self-replicating organisms
which would house a mathematical sequence in their DNA
structure that would allude to the location, content and all
relevant information about the disposal site.11 This notion of
DNA as a data packet that houses information that is then
replicated through time is a fascinating way of considering
the genome and fundamental nature of being, as not
being-in-itself but as being-for-another-time a deferred
Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository.
Source: LANL / LANS under US Department of Energy
9. Bastide, pp. 257-263.
10. Heaney, p. 660.
11. Lem.
12. Eco, p. 7.
13. Ibid.
purpose. DNA functions much as an internal language, a
language which speaks organisms into being; it is much like
the way Umberto Eco understands the framing of the biblical
creation myth, as arising from an act of speech Let there
be light.12 To Eco, the myth positions the 'voice of God' as an
interior illumination, a language that, although not translat-
able into any known idiom, is still, through a special grace or
dispensation, comprehensible to its hearer.13 In this sense
DNA functions as a perfect language, communicating the
essential being of oneself to its progeny, speaking history
through body-in-time. And in fact a lot of the research
around behavioural epigenetics confirms this notion, with
trauma and the resilience to cope with it carried through
epigenetic tags from parent to child. Like silt deposited on
the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a
tsunami recedes, our experiences, and those of our
forebears, are never gone, even if they have been forgotten.
They become a part of us, a molecular residue holding fast
to our genetic scaffolding. The DNA remains the same, but
psychological and behavioural tendencies are inherited.14
This field of genetic communication is a ripe one, but for the
purposes of nuclear semiotics it has two fundamental flaws
as a strategy for speaking through time. The first is that it
presumes a continuity of existing biosystems, positing not
only the sustained presence of this particular cat or plant
species in an age of mass extinction (brought upon by
unprecedented anthropogenic climate change, contamina-
tion of environments, urbanisation etc) but also the funda-
mental oversight of the foundational principles of evolution,
change through time; the flawed notion that a human-guided
genetic coding would prevent that very genome from experi-
encing drastic change over millennia of shifting environ-
mental and social conditions.15 The second reason that these
particular solutions are lacking is that they, as Eco notes,
presuppose precisely the sort of social continuity that the
original question had put into doubt.16 The whole field of
nuclear semiotics has been developed along the assumption
that there will exist radical if not complete ruptures
between our current societies and those of the distant
future, and to assume that an atomic priesthood, a myth of
a cat, or an ability to correctly translate complex mathemati-
cally encoded DNA ignores the point, because as radiation
breaks down molecular structure so too does time break
down myth and established systems of knowledge.
Following the initial studies by the Human Interference Task
Force, the study of nuclear semiotics was taken up in 1990
by the Marker Development Panel at Sandia National Labo-
ratories in conjunction with the planned construction of the
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Notable contribu-
tions included artist Jon Lomberg, who proposed a series of
sequential pictograms,17 and landscape artist and architect
Mike Brill, who proposed a landscape of thorns with the
intention of denoting danger.18 These proposals, like those
previously mentioned, fail to get to the heart of the issue of
speaking outside of the cultural imagination. For one,
Lombergs proposal assumes the sequential reading of his
illustration would be top to bottom, an assumption which
14. Hurley.
15. There is also the question of how radiation will alter the coded genome.
16. Eco, p. 177.
17. Trauth, p. 261.
18. Trauth, p. 130.
ignores a contemporary multitude of cultural conventions
with regard to directionality. Likewise, Brills proposition,
while surely satisfying an interest in conceptualising angu-
lar earthworks and land art, assumes that notions of what
constitutes ominous will somehow remain fixed, or that this
monumental arrangement will somehow not pique future
humans interest to further investigate. It need not even be
stated that throughout human history great monuments
have been the subject of inquiry and excavation, a process
completely antithetical to the purpose of nuclear semiotics.
The final result of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant consulta-
tions and planning processes was quite a lacklustre design
composed of 7.6m tall granite pillars arranged across the
landscape in a radial composition with earthen walls,
centred around a roofless granite room which sits atop the
site.19 The slabs and pillars that comprise the arrangement
will be replete with warnings and information signs in
Navajo and the six official languages of the UN.20 To supple-
ment this, arrangements of pictograms were being consid-
ered, including a distillation of Edvard Munchs painting The
Scream21. Umberto Ecos response to these propositions
highlights the continued inability to step outside of current
frames. He notes:
It is curious to see that, having been presented with a choice
of various types of universal language, the choice finally fell
on a narrative solution, thus reproposing what really did
happen millennia ago. Egyptian had disappeared, as well as
any other perfect and holy primordial language, and what
remains of all this is only myths, tales without a code, or
whose code has long been lost. Yet they are still capable of
keeping us in a state of vigil in our desperate effort at
decipherment.22
Tall Granite Monolith with Inscriptions
Image: Jon Lomberg Source: Sandia National Laboratory
Indeed, flipping through the 351-page report released by the
Marker Development Panel, it is clear how much lessons
from the past play into the structural formations of markers
that can materially outlast time. But the researchers fail to
regard how these places have interfaced with history, how
the meanings that we now ascribe to these sites were them-
selves narrativised under largely colonial pre/occupations.
While speaking of these architectures as a natural
19. Trauth, p. 207.
20. Trauth, p. 134.
21. Trauth, p. 203.
22. Eco, p. 177.
23. Trauth, p. 130.
language23 in the abstract sense, one cannot fully under-
stand the original intentions of these structures and
symbols; we can only rely on fields like anthropology and
archaeology to frame our reencountering of these moments
of past time.
Image: Mike Brill
Source: Sandia National Laboratory
Umberto Eco, in his book The Search for the Perfect
Language, speaks of how in biblical myth the first task given
to Adam is that of naming the creatures of the Earth He
brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them24
and so becoming the nomothete, the name-giver, the
creator of language.25 This naming did not bring the
creatures into being for they had already been made, it only
served to bring them into the frame of Adams knowing, to
speak them into relation with the anthropos. One is to under-
stand, though, that this naming was performed in a unity of
thought and speech, a logos or a coexistence of both,26 in a
perfect and universal a priori language that somehow
speaks the being of things a totalising speech. And it was a
result of the construction and eventual collapse of the Tower
of Babel that humanity was cursed with the confounding of
speech, of the erasure of that perfect language.27 There is
much historical debate as to whether or not this narrative
represents a blight or an opportunity that has allowed for a
multiplicity of unique ways of seeing, organising and inter-
preting the world.28 Generally, in western narratives this
confounding has been regarded as the root of historical
conflict,29 while Arab scholars such as Ibn Hazm question
whether the idea of the perfect language and the subse-
quent fracturing of languages are somehow independent of
each other. He posits that this perfect language wasnt
something that was completely other to our current under-
standing of language but in fact was just a language that
included all others.30 Ursula K. Le Guins Hainish Cycle
offers an alternative vision where mindspeech, a form of
direct mind-to-mind communication, forms the basis of a
galactic society because, as Le Guin suggests, between
thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter,
the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. Between
24. Eco, p. 7. 29. Eco, p. 9.
25. Ibid. 30. Eco, p. 352.
26. Eco, p. 10.
27. Eco, p. 9.
28. Eco, p. 345.
thought and sent-thought is no gap, they are one act, there is
no room for the lie.31 Le Guin inverts the Babel narrative, capacity of radiation and the significance of Edvard Munchs
positing that it is not in our mutual unknowing that the seeds
of our conflict lay but in our inability to reconcile how that
knowing functions within a nexus of needing and desiring.
The fundamental quandary however remains, as much
foregrounding the limits of our ability to communicate
across time as to relate in a way that is not presupposed by
a shared system of relations, defined by cultural adjacen-
cies. How to then escape the essential formations of
language that we all take for granted? For example, the
orientation of the reader, the ability to perceive certain
shapes as distinct from others and the very idea of mes-
sage as visual. There is a growing body of research that has
suggested that perception, remembrance, discrimination
and encoding of stimuli are in part contingent on diverging
linguistic systems,32 with a recent study by Roberson et al
noting that:
[] linguistic categorisation in adults, appears isomorphic
with cognitive representation. Perceptual space appears to
be distorted at the boundaries of colour categories, so that,
even when two languages have the same number of terms
and those terms cluster around similar points in perceptual
space, speakers of those languages show significant differ-
ences in their cognitive organisation of colour space.33
And indeed this is something that is hard to reconcile in
envisioning how to think outside of our linguistic framework
and the way that it constitutes a unique model of the
universe34. Foundationally, this is an issue in understanding
how the technology of language functions like other technol-
ogies in serving to enframe to give bounds to things. This
dilemma is a rather fundamental stretching back to a time
before planned societies. In the caves of Lascaux there
exists what is thought to be one of the oldest lunar calen-
dars, dating 15,000 BP that, based on modern interpreta-
tions, depicts the nightly cycles of the moon. What is striking
about this calendar is how the artist/astronomer
approached the depiction of the new moon, or rather the
absence of the moon. The artist chose to represent the
absence by depicting an empty square, a shape intrinsically
tied to human ways of seeing through enframing. The
technology of mark-making of paint to wall, of tools of
marking introduced a revolution in not only notions of
representation but also how these ideas of representation in
turn transformed ones experience of the represented thing.
Oral techniques of naming were supplemented with visual
techniques of naming and this naming codified a sequential
ordering of the moons passage, fundamentally redefining
its relationship with that society.35 As Winograd and Flores
note, in designing tools we are designing ways of being. The
issue then becomes that if we accept the premise that
technology fundamentally redefines our way of knowing,
seeing and naming, then the exponential growth and change
of technology in the past 10,000 years poses a problem. In
the same way that it would be ludicrous for the artist from
31. Le Guin, p. 34. 36. Haraway, p. 589.
32. Roberson, p. 36. 37. Over 200 cities between
33. Roberson, p. 42. Kayseri and Nevsehir
34. Eco, p. 338.35. Winograd and (Wikipedia).
Flores, p. 11. 38. Trauth, p. 112
Lascaux to be expected to appreciate the DNA restructuring
The Scream on a granite pillar, it would likewise be impossi-
ble to imagine the way future humans or visiting aliens will
understand our archaic scribblings. As Donna Haraway
notes, translation is always interpretive, critical, and
partial.36 Our ways of speaking are always historically and
conditionally situated, framed not only by language but also
by ideology, technology, systems of power and their redefi-
nitions of bodies in space-time.
In consideration of all of these complexities, when I task
myself with approaching this communications problem I at
once returned to the square in the Lascaux lunar calendar to
consider the fundamental process of naming within it. What
is essentially expressed in this square? What I gather is that
if the fundamental method of drawing something from the
abstract non-language of being-in-itself is to construct a
frame, then perhaps the best way to bridge the obscurity of
time and language is to merely acknowledge it to resign
ourselves not to a framing of the abstract but to the oppo-
site, to a hiding of it, to present or construct the appearance
of the absence of things. This method borrows a page from
the underground cities of Cappadocia in Central Anatolia,
Turkey. Built initially by the Phrygians in the 7-8th BCE and
later occupied and expanded by the Cappadocian Greeks,
this series of vast underground cities (Derinkuyu, the largest
one, housed up to 20,000 people) served to protect these
societies from persistent waves of conquest and genocide.37
The appearance of absence was the tactic for the avoidance
of detection, the erasing of the imprint of the human. Such a
proposal was initially floated by the Futures Panel for the
Expert Judgment on Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in 1991, which recommended not
marking the site because such a demarcation would only
draw curiosity seekers.38 The subsequent panels for
Marker Development at WIPP roundly rejected this proposal,
stating that perhaps the site would be later expanded39 and
so would need to be readily identifiable and more impor-
tantly that the site is already indelibly imprinted by the
human activity associated with waste disposal.40 Likewise,
the vast constructions of the Cappadocia doubtless left an
imprint, but imprints are not always indelible.
Lascaux Lunar Calendar
Source: lascaux.culture.fr
39. Expansion could result from a possible national centralisation of waste
storage as a result of political pressure from lobby groups and citizen
mobilization against the locating of future sites near cities, towns, or
sensitive ecological zones(Trauth, p. 100).
40. Trauth, p. 100.
Perhaps the solution to the nuclear semiotics problem can
be located in an expansive implementation of the practices
of restoration ecology, the idea of re-creating an entire
ecosystem, community, or landscape, complete with all its
parts and processes.41 The idea of complete ecocentric
restoration, as opposed to meliorative land management, is
a relatively new concept that emerged in the mid-1930s
when Ted Sperry, an ecologist supervising a tall-grass
prairie restoration in Wisconsin, instructed the Civilian
Conservation Corps to disassemble an old stone wall and
rescatter the stones as they might have been left by retreat-
ing glaciers 13 thousand years earlier.42 This process of
repair and return would have to function in a more intensive
way than simply a returning of rocks, it would have to be a
multidisciplinary collaborative effort whereby specialists in
fields of geology, forestry, zoology and others would collabo-
ratively reconstruct a simulacra of original sites of Yucca
Mountain or WIPP. This would involve, for instance, covering
the entrances to the passages with the original earth/stone
and a reinscription of erosion patterns, of the markings of
deep time, a reintroduction of flora and fauna, and other
such reparative measures. This process would initially
involve a forensic investigation of the site both before and
after the construction process, examining existing historical
aerial and photo documentation and intensive field
research, in a sense to reconstruct the scene before the
crime. However, even a visually compelling erasure would
be deficient if the societies that encounter the site have tools
to register the presence of radiation, in which case one
would hope that they would have knowledge of not only its
presence but also its danger.
As it happens, neither the Yucca Mountain nor the WIPP
project inquiries have yet led to an actual built response to
the nuclear semiotics design problem, as both sites have
experienced works stoppages Yucca resulting from
environmental/legislative issues and WIPP from a leak that
led to worker exposure to radiation. And it is this fact that
perhaps the most levelheaded proposal from Zeitschrift Fr
Semiotik unpacks. In her proposal titled The problem is not
just the answers, but the conditions, Susanne Hauser ques-
tions the ability of the depository structures to sufficiently
safeguard against natural interference, and in lieu of such
safeguards that the further production of waste be ceased.43
It is in fact this uncertainty regarding the safety of the facility
and the probable seepage of waste into aquifers (through
the eventual corrosion of the storage canisters by brine
seepage44 or the accidental penetration of the storage facili-
ties by mining and petroleum interests)45 that motivated
the Markers Panel to insist on the presence of markers as a
moral obligation to those eventually affected by inadvertent
contamination. While anti-nuclear movements
post-Fukushima strive to wean societies off the further
exploitation of nuclear power and the technology for the
reprocessing of waste continues to develop, making a nucle-
ar waste-free world theoretically possible, the questions
that have arisen as a result of nuclear semiotics persist. If
not to communicate an apology or warning to the future of
our present misdeeds, what else could we or should we
41. Jordan III, p. 17. 46. Haraway, 589.
42. Ibid.
43. Hauser.
44. Trauth, p. 113.
45. Trauth, p. 33.
speak to the future? And in developing a programme for
speaking to the future we must problematise the predomi-
nately western framing of past communications and consid-
er a multiperspectival approach that includes different ways
of knowing. We must bring in not only views from above but
also views from the body, where partiality and not univer-
sality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowl-
edge claims.46
Pictograph Definition of Symbols-Skull and Crossbones
Image: Jon Lomberg
Source: Sandia Laboratory
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