The year 2000 was once symbolic of “the future” — the world of tomorrow filled with utopian possibilities for art and technology. Entering the millennium, something is awry in the spirit of tomorrow, for there exists a strange pattern of ‘zeros’ in culture and technology, all related to the space-time coordinates of the future. Ground zero, carbon zero, Coke Zero. What do these zeros suggest? Void or emptiness, end or beginning, the past or the future for utopia? It is ground zero for theory. (100p)

Published: March 28, 2008
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In the early years of the third millennium, the Voyager 1 space probe exited the solar system, but not before turning its cameras back toward Earth, revealed to be a tiny speck receding into the dark cosmic void. Like Earth disappearing in its own rearview mirror, modernity is crashing into its vanishing points, where it confronts five apocalypses — nuclear, virtual, ecological, secular, and cosmic — each with its own ground zero — Trinity, Tomorrowland, Gaia hypothesis, Apollo 8, and the Big Bang.

forthcoming November 2008

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Early in the third millennium, Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, raised awareness of global warming via space age utopianism that mapped the fate of civilization upon the starry skies. From Plato and Ptolemy, Kant and Newton, to Kubrick and Serling, there has been profound human desire to situate human destiny amidst the starry skies. But just what is our cosmic fate — spaceship earth or planet of apes, space odyssey or cyberspace, no exit or twilight zone — in a universe of the Big Bang, with the starry skies moving away?

forthcoming November 2008

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On September 11, 2001, humans jumped from the heights of the World Trade Center. Strangely, people leaping from skyscrapers had been filmed in The Game and Vanilla Sky. Rising above the steeples of superstition, skyscrapers symbolized modernity reaching for the starry skies, yet the Falling Man suggests not merely the horrors of terrorism, but the vertiginous conditions and cultural voids of postmillennial culture. The secular metropolis is facing skyscraper vertigo.

forthcoming October 2009

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Theory has reached zero conditions, with modernity crashing into the vanishing points, the metropolis confronting skyscraper vertigo, and the starry skies moving away in the big bang universe. If there is a place where art, nature, and technology have combined to radically distill the existential conditions of postmillennial culture, then perhaps it is in the vast deserts of Nevada. Anasazi, the Bomb, Burning Man, Area 51, Luxor, Las Vegas, Earth Art City, Extraterrestrial Highway, Bonneville salt flats, Clock of the Long Now, 5000-year old trees, and the nothingnesses in the deserts of the real — these are the ground zeros for imagining any utopia of the future, the Nevada Test Sites.

forthcoming December 2009

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