Rocks and Code is an installation about the interconnected histories of uranium mining (specifically in Grants, New Mexico), mathematics, nuclear physics, and ultimately, randomness and random numbers which I choose to see as an informationless anti-oracle, an "absolute truth" relied upon by science.
Substantial research was done for this installation, culminating in my MFA thesis (Rocks and Code PDF, University of California, Irvine 2009), a synthesis of disparate interests of mine that have long informed my work: the history and pre-history of computing, the "info-war" aspects of World War Two and the "Cold War" that followed it, and two decades of American Southwest desert road trips.
The installation consists of still and video images of a former uranium mill in Grants, New Mexico (one of 24 EPA Superfund "remediation" sites in the country as of 2010), electronic/sculptural elements described below, and various related physical artifacts and texts.
The centerpiece of the installation is my Atomic Number Generator, a machine that uses the inherent randomness of the radioactive decay of natural uranium ore, mined from Grants New Mexico and elsewhere, to generate true random numbers. The machine verbalizes, in a difficult electronic voice, the numbers produced.
Work within this line of research continues, exploring fundamental assumptions about the basis of the science, in my Gas Tube Noise Generator; beginning with a rigorous re-creation of the Rand Corporation's 1948 device that produced a table of random numbers in use for over half a century, the Noise Generator brings human fallibility into the equation.
(The production of truly random numbers is a rigorous mathematical discipline with theoretical underpinnings in physics, statistics, mathematics, biology, law, politics ancient and modern, tarot, the I Ching, religion, ... my interest here lies mainly in mid-20th-century technologies and science. For a random (sic) sampling, see my "review" of the Rand Corporation's book "A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" (1955)).
