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Recto Vegas

The term recto-verso is used in the worlds of printing, binding, and publishing. It describes a two-sided text or the front and back of a one-sheet artwork. A recto-verso drawing is a sheet with drawings on both sides. While recto means "front side" of a leaf, and verso refers to the reverse or back, usually there is no obvious primary side.

Recto Vegas approaches the casinos of the Las Vegas strip as recto-verso visual texts. Our project questions whether the Casinos of the Las Vegas strip have a primary side.

We photographed the casinos as many visitors do: by shooting from the window of a moving car--an instinctual reaction to the reality that the strip offers more than can ever be taken in from a single vantage point.

We took the night photos during one pass up the strip, from south to north. The daytime photos were taken during two passes from north to south: early morning down the east side of the strip looking west and late afternoon down the west side of the strip looking east.

Whether it's Recto Vegas or Vegas Verso--it's prime "Las Vegas."

(click to enlarge images)

Paris, Las Vegas


Planet Hollywood

Tropicana

MGM

Bally's

Luxor

Mandalay Bay

Disney

New York, New York

Bellagio

Caesar's Palace

Wynn

Circus Circus

postcards to Freeman Dyson

take a polaroid journey

sketch 1



sketch 2

farewell land of enchantment!
Please enjoy our adopted theme song for what has come to be known as, "the big trip".

Yesterday's text to Freeman Dyson will not be sent. After consulting the local police regarding weather conditions in Dulce, NM we decided we were ready to try again. We spent another 9 hours on the road yesterday, but smudgers never quit, they move in accord. It now truly feels like the "work" of this journey is complete. From here, we can begin to look back at these past 31 days and assess just how fundamentally changed we are and what to begin to make in response.

"For those of you accustomed to being taken from point A to point B to point C, this presentation may be somewhat difficult to follow. Pueblo expression resembles something like a spider's web — with many little threads radiating from the center, crisscrossing one another. As with the web, the structure emerges as it is made, and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made." - Leslie Marmon Silko

project Gasbuggy

"The Gasbuggy Nuclear Test Site is the location of a 1967 underground nuclear explosion, conducted to test the viability of using a nuclear device to aid in natural gas extraction. It was part of the Plowshare Program, the program to develop peaceful uses of nuclear weapons, and was the first use of a nuclear explosion for industrial purposes. The test was overseen by the San Francisco Operations Office of the Atomic Energy Commission, and was conducted by the Lawrence Radiation Lab (later to become the Lawrence Livermore National Lab) in conjunction with the El Paso Natural Gas Company. Called "gas stimulation," the technique has been used employing conventional explosives, and it was hoped that a larger nuclear explosion would be capable of opening up "tight" gas deposits which are not otherwise economically viable. The test called for a 29-kiloton nuclear device to be placed at the bottom of a 4,240-foot deep shaft drilled in a "tight" shale formation known to contain natural gas. To a large degree the experiment went as planned: the underground cavity produced by the explosion, 80 feet wide and 335 feet high, filled with natural gas from the fractured surrounding rock. However the gas was too radioactive to be commercially distributed by the public utilities." -from the CLUI site

This was the road we couldn't find last Friday, F.S. 357. We only saw it as we were leaving. Hidden in plain sight.


After much ado we learned that J-10 (Apache reservation road) is the same as F.S. 357. We were at J-58 last Friday - a mile down the road. Perhaps the rain and lightning were a signal to not proceed.


despite looming clouds and the likely chance of a sudden downpour we proceeded onto J-10


It would have been an interesting 7 mile drive down this road if rain had materialized


the site is marked upon entering the Carson National Forest


Gasbuggy is marked as a "point of interest", indeed it was for us.




through the gate


Into an open meadow. Different plants grow in the area surrounding the site.
Storms gather in the distance.




the much anticipated monument


Gasbuggy yielded twice the kilotons of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima







we closed the journey once we made it safely back to Highway 64 without incident



the scenic route back to Santa Fe


the incredible Cabezon in the distance


though not one drop of rain landed on our car the area had obviously experienced flash floods



red road in Jemez Springs


We ended the day by passing through Los Alamos one more time.
On our way into town our breath was taken away at the enormity of the Valles Caldera.

On Friday we attempted to visit Gasbuggy. It was the last of the anomalous nuclear sites in New Mexico and Nevada that we had planned to visit on this journey.

The text from the postcard that I will send to Freeman Dyson in response,

Dear Freeman Dyson,
Gasbuggy. Northern New Mexico nested in a Colorado landscape.

The directions fall short, Apache tribal land meets Carson National Forest at indiscernible border. Up and down highway 64 with storms gathering in the sky. Pouring rain and lightning. Tires carve canyons into road. Impassable. Locals call this "monsoon season".

We sat at the entrance, 7 miles from the site and turned away. I did not feel Gasbuggy for myself, but did feel the force of this place.

1967, 29 kilotons at 4,2240 feet. A potential gas extraction project, failed due to unexpected radiation. I project my imagination into a forest clearing to see the monument. Poetic justice for the end of a 32-day journey that has no closure.

The last card of seven, thank you for receiving.

Jamie

Today we went to the site of Gnome.

"The Gnome Nuclear Test Site is the location of a 1961 underground nuclear test conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission. This was the first test in the Plowshare Program, a program to develop peaceful uses for nuclear weapons. The Lawrence Radiation Lab (which later became Lawrence Livermore National Lab) designed this test, which was to have many physical experiments associated with it, including the collection of isotopes, and to study the possibility of using nuclear explosions to generate electricity. The test, one of two large-scale underground nuclear tests in New Mexico, was conducted 1,200 feet below the surface in a salt deposit. The nuclear device was placed at the end of an underground corridor over 1,000 feet long. When detonated, the device, with an explosive yield equivalent to 3,100 tons of TNT, created a cavity 164 feet long and 72 feet high. A stream of radioactive smoke and steam flowed out of the shaft and ventilation lines, and formed a radioactive cloud that traveled northwards (and was detected, by some, as far away as Kansas). Even though workers entered the chamber just a few months after the blast, the cavity remains highly radioactive to this day. The surface of the test site is now used to graze cattle, and the same salt formation is now the location of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, eight miles north of the site." from the CLUI site

a white cow in front of the Salt Lake of New Mexico, along the way to Gnome


the Carlsbad area is filled with dispersed industrial sites


petroleum and salt seem like primary resources


the road to Gnome


an enormous concrete pad the covers the entrance to the the chamber (1ooo ft. to ground zero)






the monument marking Gnome


relay to Project Shoal in Nevada


relay to Project Faultless


valve to ground zero


after visiting Gnome we sent in search of WIPP, 8 miles to the north


the WIPP building, the Permian salt chambers and transuranic waste lie beneath, bound for deep time.