Elliot Anderson has uploaded materials related to his Nonsite presentation, and you can find them as attachments  here (at the bottom of that page).

What follows below is Elliot's description of Silicon Monuments: Tour of the Superfund Sites of Silicon Valley >>

On Saturday, September 30, 1967 Robert Smithson travels to the post-industrial lands along the Passaic River in a mytho-poetic search for entropic monuments of the late twentieth century. The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey is a testament to an irreversible ahistoric future. The twenty-first century has its own monuments dedicated to waste and decay.  Contemporaneous with Smithson’s expedition Silicon Valley was erecting its monuments to a future technologically determined entropic panorama.  Monuments constructed as ruins of an absolute obsolescence. 

Reading from Smithson’s The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey I will invite participants to formulate questions that interrogate the Superfund Site as monument and commons.  To locate the text in the contemporary landscape I will screen images from his project The Monuments of Silicon Valley.  

In collaboration with the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) I am designing a technology-based multi-media tour of toxic waste sites in Silicon Valley.  The SVTC has been a formidable political action organization that focuses on pollution and environmental hazard produced as the result of high-tech industrial processes.  The organization was instrumental in having sites in Silicon Valley designated as superfund sites.  In addition the coalition helped formulate legislation that led to the Right to Know act, which makes it a legal requirement that industry notify residents of storage and use of potentially harmful chemicals and chemical processes.  

As part of SVTC's educational efforts the organization in the past has offered tours of Superfund sites in Silicon Valley.  However, these tours lacked the impact of the type of industrial sites common in the rust belt or other "brown fields" on the East Coast.  Most of the Silicon Valley locations seem "clean", thus the notion of "clean-tech".  This proves dystonic to the participants of the tour, whose imaginary is inhabited by open pits of industrial waste and ponds lurid colored waters.  Most sites are typical suburban neighborhoods.  One in particular has a school located on top of contaminated ground water.

The work I am developing is an attempt to remedy and make legible the toxicity of the site, its politics, social justice issues, and the historical land use.  To this end I am creating software that runs on the iPhone and iPad that will locate the participant on the tour and relay the layering of the site in sound, image, and text.  The irony of using a technology to talk about the polluting aspects of the technology has not escaped me and is worth interrogating.  

There are a series of question that are important to consider, which can bring us to a useful understanding of "site" and "commons".  I propose we use these words interchangeably in certain circumstances.  I wish to appropriate the historical meaning of "commons" as a public meeting place - physical space.  Such spaces are the site of political action and democracy building consensus.  Union Square in NY and Boston Commons.  Can a ground water aquifer be such a commons?  Thus "site" opens up for us the opportunity to evaluate politics in the physical register.  The abstraction of a "resource" such as water denies the common ownership of the resource.  It then operates as what Heidegger termed the "standing reserve."  

The artwork I'm creating demands physical presence but is augmented by data that peals layers from the site and deconstructs the notion of "resource".  This revealing process requires the physical relationship to place.  Much like Smithson's act of revealing the Monuments of the Passaic my work is an attempt to bring the participant into presence with the site.

The tour will cover three sites: First a former IBM manufacturing facility now superfund site.  This site visit  introduces the viewer to history of toxic contamination from the high-tech industry and the political and social justice action taken to bring the site to the attention of government and the public.  The second site is an electronics recycling center that operates safely and cleanly.  The third site is a solar panel manufacturing facility.  Silicon Valley is now the site for new "green" industries such as solar panel research and development.  As with earlier "clean" tech industry there a concerns about toxics from the production of solar panels (SVTC is also focusing on nano-technologies, which remain unregulated).  In addition older solar panels are being removed and replaced with newer technologies.  This results in issues of recycling and waste from older solar panels, which contain contaminants and carcinogens.  Often electronics refuse is shipped to China, India, and Africa for recycling.  Those countries lack worker protection and environmental regulations.  One site leads to another...the sites of our waste becomes sites of toxicity around the world.  SVTC is focusing on solar panel recycling and workers' rights in India and China.

Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition: http://www.svtc.org/site/PageServer

Right to the City: http://www.righttothecity.org/home.html

Dear Taylor, Pat, Katy, Tanya, Jocelyn, Daniel, Elliot, Michael, Chris, Steven, and Anne-Lesley:

This is an open letter, and a brief set of reflections on our recent meeting, not at all meant to be comprehensive.

Thanks everyone for coming on Sunday! The discussion was rich, and the dinner following was a real pleasure (Michael's sweet potatoes, Taylor's asparagus, Pat and Katy's wine!).

As mentioned at the meeting, David Wolach will be visiting on the weekend of July 24 for a reading, and a Nonsite activity or conversation around his work on the body. This will find its place as part of a Summer suite of events, together with Thom Donovan's scheduled Nonsite date on the weekend of July 18, and Elliot Anderson's June activity around Smithson's "Tour of the Monuments of Passaic". More on this suite of  events, soon.

I want to introduce you to David Wolach by way of his recent weblog post on the Nonsite Collective, here. In his post, David offers a beautiful response to Thom Donovan's recent reflections on Nonsite at the Harriet blog, here .

Our conversation about extending involvement trans-locally was enhanced by Pat Clifford and Katy Heins' presence, visiting from Cincinnati, where we anticipate seeing some Nonsite activity in the near future.

The new curriculum, called Project on the Commons now has a workbook page on the Nonsite Collective website, here. We're hoping that this curriculum will help us to link activities and projects now taking place in New York and Vancouver, with work in the Bay Area. Thom Donovan's visit this Summer will offer an occasion to think more concretely about this. For the time being, the workbook page can offer a place for organizing materials, beginning with Stephen Collis's awesome essay, "Of Blackberries and the Poetic Commons", which he will post here soon, from Vancouver.

The prospect for a suite of Fall events around the question of Social Practice and the visual arts is very promising. Thanks for this idea, Elliot! Can we invite our proposed guest curators for that soon?

There's always more of course, but for now, consider responding here with some notes or reflections of your own.

xx // -- Rob.

At our March meeting, we discussed the recent trio of Nonsite events, with a mind toward linking and sustaining some of the threads that emerged there, specifically around the archive (see my report on Kim Hoerbe's talk here ), self-organized pedagogy (look forward to Miranda Mellis's forthcoming report on EE Miller's "Facilitate This" ), and eco-poetics (a report on Jonathan Skinner's recent talk on "The Poetics of the Third Landscape" coming soon).

One way the collective would like to imagine continuing this inquiry is by way of "Project on the Commons", a trans-local Nonsite collaboration with work in New York City facilitated by Robert Kocik and Daria Fain (see Commoning ), and work in Vancouver facilitated by Stephen Collis (see "Of Blackberries and the Poetic Commons ," as well as The Poetic Front ). Nonsite will be setting up a workbook page for "Project on the Commons" on this website soon, where we intend to post and archive a range of related materials. Thom Donovan's visit in July will offer an occasion to launch the Bay Area's local end of this project.

Finally, we discussed our plans to post a call for curatorial proposals for a series of collaborative events/activities with visual artists, musicians, and/or choreographers related to any of Nonsite's ongoing curricula. This would be for this Fall 2010, and would build on our Alternative Exposure Grant Proposal (which you can read here ). We did not receive the grant, but remain committed to seeing its intentions through. Stay tuned for this call.

Kim Hoerbe’s talk on “Pauline Oliveros and the Archive” was the occasion for an excellent Nonsite event that took place on Sunday afternoon, 2/21/10, at the collective’s provisional South of Market digs, Nicole Hollis’s design studio.

Hoerbe is visiting from Berlin, and his research is located at the intersection of music and philosophy. He’s currently writing about Oliveros’s work with experimental electronic music in the 1960s, and his research has brought him to Mills College, which is the location of the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM). (Oliveros was the first director of the Mills Tape Music Center after the San Francisco Tape Music Center migrated to Mills with a Rockefeller Grant in the Summer of 1966, only to become the CCM several years later under the direction of Robert Ashley.)

Hoerbe had barely introduced his talk when the group began voicing a range of questions, all of which seemed to dovetail beautifully with Hoerbe’s own intentions, concerns, and ideas.

On the weekend of October 2-4 2009, a gathering of activists and poets converged on the city of Portland for an event called EcoNvergence which focused on the current ecological / economic crises, and on responses to these crises among activists, and polticially committed writers and scholars.

In the weeks in advance of the event, one of EconVergence's organizers, Kaia Sand, and myself engaged in an exchange addressing the challenges of involving poet and artists in the various discussions planned for the event.

Kaia did an amazing job doing precisely this, and her efforts resulted in a number of poet led events, like a PACE action on the streets of Portland,  as well as the involvement of poets on a number of panels. But this was not without obstacle and frustration.

Because Nonsite shares the concerns of Kaia's efforts to work across the "disciplined" boundaries that too often keep poets and artists alienated from activist-oriented discussions--as if the work of poets and artists were irrelevant to the work of activism--I want to open a space to log various texts, reports, and exchanches around the EcoNvergence.

See below for an exchange between Kaia Sand, David Wolach, and myself.

You can find the "official" info on the econvergence here.

Look forward to comments and additional post around this discussion, including a conversation by CAConrad and Frank Sherlock.

 [for the correspondence, just click "Read More" below...]