Typically, quarantine is thought of in the context of disease control. It is used to isolate people who have been exposed to a contagious virus or bacteria and, as a result, may (or may not) be carrying the infection themselves. But quarantine does not apply only to people and animals. Its boundaries can be set up for as long as needed, creating spatial separation between clean and dirty, safe and dangerous, healthy and sick, foreign and native—however those labels are defined.
As a result, the practice of quarantine extends far beyond questions of epidemic control and pest-containment strategies to touch on issues of urban planning, geopolitics, international trade, ethics, immigration, and more. And although the practice dates back at least to the arrival of the Black Death in medieval Venice, if not to Christ’s 40 days in the desert, quarantine has re-emerged as an issue of urgency and importance in today’s era of globalization, antibiotic resistance, emerging diseases, pandemic flu, and bio-terrorism.
An opening reception will be held this week on Tuesday, March 9. It's free and open to the public.
Meanwhile, we did some curating again and hashtagged 10 relevant posts: #quarantine.
We're paying a return visit to the Center for PostNatural History, this time for Permitted Habitats, their infographic on genetically modified organisms allowed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for field tests since 1987. This map shows where these neo-florae have been released into the environment, which institutions have applied for the permits to conduct the experiments, and what enhancements these organisms have been engineered with, for instance, drought tolerance and fungal resistance.
Having taken many joyrides over the years throughout Illinois, which according to the map has hosted many of these real world trials, we may have driven past by one or two of these plots. But we wouldn't know. Some protocols may have been set up so that no rogue environmentalists will come and uproot the plants, say, electrified fences or surveillance sensors, but perhaps the best form of quarantine is anonymity and apparent ordinariness. One passes by them oblivious, because they are as unremarkable as the next hundreds of thousands of rows of corns. But of course they're not. To once again borrow from Trevor Paglen, these are genomic dark spots in the landscape, fully alight with the Midwestern sun.
One of the things we like about this map is how the icons pop in and out, sometimes massing together and swelling to shroud an entire state before desiccating gradually. Quiet passages of solitary icons here and there, then a massive pileup; transgenic thunderstorms developing over some skies somewhere, possibly flooding an uncontaminated gene pool with a deluge of foreign DNAs. It's like watching the time-lapsed maps of The Weather Channel.
Or the as yet uncommissioned The Transgenic Weather Channel. Instead of actual meteorological events, it will track these genetic fringes, these dark topographies shrouded in secrecy by Big Agro, Big Pharma and their patent lawyers, for any signs of quarantine breaches. When something jumps over the fence, periodic bulletins will be issued.
High 70s. Clear in the a.m. Thick fog of insulin pollen in the p.m.
If the U.S. Department of Homeland Security leaves its labs on Plum Island — “America's first line of defense against foreign animal diseases” — for swankier digs on the mainland where researchers would be able to handle the most dangerous animal pathogens, what would you do with the abandoned island?
An editor for Nature offered up some suggestions, including using the site for a “future museum on Craig Venter and his synthetic life form” and an “organic plum farm,” of course. But maybe instead of giving it to Craig Venter, the government deeds the buildings and the entire island to Richard Pell for his PostNatural History Museum.
Geoff, Mette and Mark's intensive design studio on Cockatoo Island ended a couple of weeks ago, with the next one in 2011 (or so we hear), so perhaps in the interim they'll island hop to Plum Island next summer (or post-abandonment). How would students respond to this particular island, once described as a “ticking biological time bomb” located so close to so many major population centers? What projects would they confect after rambling about the place where outbreaks of three infectious diseases (for instance, the West Nile virus in 1999) were alleged to have started; where wild animals are killed on sight but a habitat for several bird species is nevertheless supported; and where the serial killer Hannibal Lecter would have enjoyed a brief respite from his incarceration but one which he sneeringly rejected?
Detached physically and conceptually from the everyday and the larger landscapes in so many ways — away from the “mainland” way of doing things and into the avant-garde realms of Dr. Moreau and Dr. No and even into the off-grid DIYs of Giligan's castaway mates and still yet into the seemingly supradimensional fantascapes of Ricardo Montalban and Tattoo: what wildly experimental terrains will they terraform?
The New York Times paid a visit this week to a national biological defense lab. Scientists there will “do research into some of the nastiest diseases on the planet, among them Ebola, anthrax, tularemia, West Nile virus, drug-resistant tuberculosis, bubonic plague, avian influenza and typhus.”
If that isn't fascinating enough, the lab's “gleaming new building” happens to be located in one of the most unstable types of landform and where hurricanes regularly make a mess of things: the barrier island of Galveston, Texas.
Built atop concrete pylons driven 120 feet into the ground, the seven-floor laboratory was designed to stand up to 140-mile-an-hour winds. Its backup generators and high-security laboratories are 30 feet above sea level.
Says the lab's deputy director, “The entire island can wash away and this is still going to be here.”
A gleaming biological bunker, as impenetrable and monolithic as CIA HQ, a Pandora Box protruding out in a landscape of ruins and shifting sands.
If blanketing UK cities with a thick scopic fog of CCTV cameras weren't enough, the countryside may soon find itself placed under similar heavy surveillance. But this, curiously enough, might be a good thing.
As reported by BBC News last month, researchers from technology firm QinetiQ and from Aberystwyth University flew an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) “over fields in England and Wales to map the nitrogen levels in soil, to determine whether fertiliser applications were needed.”
The data collected was then used to create a Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) map, which “tells you the difference between 'green crops' that are photosynthesising and bare ground.” Where there is bare ground, more fertilizer may be needed.
Equipped with this NDVI map, some GPS locators and a techno-pimped out John Deere, farmers would thus be able to target areas in need of supplemental nutrients and to better estimate how much to use, potentially releasing less fertilizers that otherwise would leach out and pollute water sources down the hydrological line. This is precision farming.
Of course, you can use the same information-gathering technique to monitor other environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, disease outbreaks and pest population.
The ecological impact is potentially huge. Imagine only watering crops that need to be watered (and only when required) instead of flooding the entire field. Imagine as well spraying just those diseased plants with herbicides (and only when there is an outbreak) instead of suffocating acres and acres of fields with poison all the time. Better yet, you send in a cadre of Medusa agrobots networked to GPS satellites to surgically excise these botanical tumors.
With a surveillance network such as this, one wonders if you can re-purpose it to monitor other things, say, the urban poor doing a bit of nighttime grocery shopping while the food crisis and subprime armageddon rage on in the inner cities. When detected, they get sprayed with herbicides.
How about GMO crops? Design these neo-plants to emit a characteristic glow in the infrared or ultraviolet wavelength, and you can be alerted when they've jumped the fence. And don't forget to allocate part of the network to keep a look out for anti-GMO anarchists.
It's entirely possible that future pharms will be as heavily monitored as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and as maniacally firewalled as CIA servers.
Meanwhile, how about using a similar surveillance network to monitor acts of agro-criminality?
As food prices have soared in recent months, farmers in the UK and in the U.S. have started to abandon conservation programs. Through these programs, farmers receive government subsidies for letting some of their fields lay fallow, but not as much if they were to now grow cash crops like wheat, soybeans and corn. Consequently, many of these uncultivated croplands, which have greatly helped restore wildlife habitats and reverse topsoil erosion, are being farmed once again.
Farmers are required to notify the government when they opt out of these programs. But do they really? Could they not be alerting the local agriculture bureau in order to keep their subsidies?
Specially in the U.S., it's rather difficult to tell if a farmer is being honest or not. There is just too much land. To make it easier to detect promises kept and promises broken, the U.S. Department of Agriculture initiated the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP).
Farmers may seem like trustworthy people, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking no chances. It's spending tens of millions of dollars to create an enormous computerized map of every farmer's field in America. The program is intended to make sure farmers are doing what's required to earn their government subsidies.
It's an enormous task, keeping track of those subsidies. They add up to billions of dollars each year and they go to more than half a million farmers, scattered from Maine to California. Some farmers receive payments for protecting streams and wetlands; others, for growing specific crops. In each case, the payments depend on accurate information on the amount of land involved. So the USDA has resorted to a program of overhead reconnaissance — something akin of spy flights.
We are told that the maps generated from these overhead reconnaissances aren't released to the public, as doing so might violate the farmers' privacy. But imagine releasing them to the internet wilderness of distributed grid computing, data pornographers, meme-hungry social networking sites, open source virtuality and web-savvy eco-guerrillas.
It'd be like Stardust@home or SETI@home, except you're asking the teeming Web 2.0 masses to look for terrestrial counterfeit. Instead of surveying the Martian landscapes for uncatalogued craters and landforms, citizen agro-agents will survey nearer terrains in search of horticultural deviants, the tenuous peace between the urban and the rural be damned.
Persuade Wired, Boing Boing, Engadget, Slashdot and even Land8Lounge to blog about this, and you could have an army of volunteers comparing maps for hours on end, late into the night, during lunchbreaks or boring studio lectures to spot planted fields where there should be reconstructed prairie or wetlands. This may even be the only time they get to interface with that other wilderness beyond the urban periphery — with Nature — for an extended amount of time.
Protecting your tax dollars while saving the environment and enjoying the outdoors.
But will England's green and pleasant land become an aviary of sorts for pilotless airplanes (how about solar powered mini-dirigibles?), whose droning bird songs in B-flat will commingle with the melodic twittering of traditional birds, the hypnotic chirping of crickets and the nostalgic rustling of grains against the wind? “Ah, the sounds of summer,” passing urbanites will plaintively sigh.
Will America's majestic horizons darken with a murmuring data cloud kicking up a neverending electromagnetic storm?
POSTSCRIPT #1:Boing Boing picked up our post on Agro-veillance, and the comments there are worth a read. They form a dialogue that a lot of blogs long for.
The world is so unkind to pharmaceutical agriculture that some pharmers have gone underground to conduct their Doctor Moreauvian experiments.
In an article published a little over two years ago in Wired, we learn that a team of scientists from Purdue University, in partnership with Controlled Pharming Ventures LLC, had designed and built a subterranean experimental field inside a 60-acre former limestone mine in southern Indiana.
They did so not to escape the loud protestations of environmentalists and the uncomfortable attention from government regulators and consumer groups but rather for safety reasons, believing that pharming in an enclosed, climate-controlled environment rather than in the “bucolic, sun-dappled landscape” above ground would lessen the chance of their transgenic crops contaminating the regular food supply chain.
But apart from wanting to insure themselves against expensive civil litigation and perhaps even from criminal prosecution, the team of entrepreneurs also wanted to develop more efficient techniques and, with encouraging results, jump start a beleaguered industry suffering from bad publicity and government restrictions. Fortunately for them, the initial year-long trial was indeed very promising. Their experiment showed that their growth chamber generated an average yield of genetically modified corn (267 bushels per acre) higher than that of normal field corn in the U.S. (142 bushels per acre).
In other words, you can indeed grow cash crops in sub-optimal conditions in an underground mine — solid empirical data to excite optimism among pharmaceutical companies. (And Russian doomsday cults.)
If cave pharming does indeed catch on in the pharmaceutical industry, how would that actually be manifested in the landscape?
One could easily imagine, among many scenarios, Monsanto and Johnson & Johnson combining their expertise and their billions of cash to excavate a complex of scalable void farms, some of which are dug so deep that hydrothermal energy can be harvested to power the entire tunnel network, beneath obsolete farms that have been returned back to their pre-agricultural state or converted into either the new Yellowstone to mask the aberrant activities occurring below or a Pleistocene Park as surface evidence of a subterranean biotech utopia.
Going into a somewhat different trajectory, specifically to continue a line of speculation from a previous post on an African bridge house: can someone be fundamentally altered — like the corn they're cultivating to produce cancer cures — while living quasi-permanently in flourescent-lit dampness and hermetic seclusion, detached from the vagaries of weather, time and natural pollination, amidst pure geology?
In between reports from CNN of Paris Hilton's impending subtopian incarceration (in a section of Los Angeles' Century Regional Detention Center reserved for celebrities, public officials, police officers and other high-profile inmates, in a cell shared with a “reckless driver”)‚ and Lindsay Lohan's upcoming 21st birthday bacchanalia (in Las Vegas, right after spending 30 days at the celebrity architecture du jour — the rehab center), we heard reports of the jet-setting TB-infected Atlanta lawyer quarantined in Denver (an accidental celebrity in a rehab center of a different kind, as it were), flown there yesterday with an escort of federal marshals.
His flight manifest immediately piqued our interest. It's a doozy.
News reports tell us that after it was discovered that he had been infected with tuberculosis and advised not to travel, Andrew Speaker took a flight anyway for his wedding and honeymoon, first to Paris and then to Greece, presumably taking sidetrips here and there. After Greece, Speaker took another flight to Rome. There, he received a phone call telling him that further tests have revealed that his TB was of an extremely dangerous form. Now placed on the US no-fly list, he decided to cirumvent this restriction on his movement by flying to Montreal via Prague — in a confined space(!) for over 8 hours(!) with other people(!) within close transmission range! From Canada, he then crossed the border back to the U.S. by car. The CDC was frantically trying to get in touch with Speaker during this time. Upon learning that he was back in the country and en route to New York, they instructed him to check himself into a hospital there.
(We want to mention that he was phoned by one Dr. Martin S. Cetron, who as the director of the CDC's Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, should definitely be interviewed.)
His travels were not yet over. After being quarantined for three days in New York, he was put on a flight — this time on a CDC-operated plane with masked passengers and crew — to Atlanta where he was detained under a federal health order, making him the first patient to be placed in forced isolation in more than 40 years. And yesterday, as previously mentioned, he was flown yet again to Denver. Whether this is the last leg of his Infection Tour of 2007, we don't know.
As dizzying as this sounds, one only needs to imagine health officers tracking down the passengers and crew, their connecting flights (if any) and their connecting flights afterwards (if any), and to their drive home with family and friends, to hotels and restaurants, and their countless passings through crowded public spaces, to realize that there's a lot to trace and retrace still.
For a cartographer, it must sound absolutely spine tingling. It's like mapping out the initial migration of the 1918 flu pandemic from Kansas to the trenches of World War I and then to the rest of the world; or plotting the route taken by the HIV virus from its incubation chamber in the rain forests of Congo and its journey up and down the Kinshasa Highway (a.k.a. AIDS Highway) before bursting out of Africa.
In what must have been some amazing synchronicity, Critical Spatial Practice reminded us yesterday about Terminal Air by Trevor Paglen and the Institute for Applied Autonomy.
Spatialized as a CIA office-cum-travel agency in Langley, Virginia, from where the Extraordinary Rendition Program is presumably coordinated, the project explores the “complex interconnections between government agencies and private contractors involved with the United States Central Intelligence Agency's extraordinary rendition program. Since the mid-90’s, the CIA has operated the extraordinary rendition program, in which suspected terrorists captured in Western nations are transported to secret locations for torture and interrogation. A thoroughly modern enterprise, the extraordinary rendition program is largely carried out using leased equipment and private contractors. These private charter planes often use civilian airports for refueling, making their movements subject to public record and visible to anyone who knows which tail numbers to look for.”
In the future Ebola-SARS-smallpox-Avian flu scourge, rendition flights for the terminally ill will be coordinated in a CDC/WHO office-cum-travel agency and carried out using remotely operated private charter planes departing from little known and abandoned airports, stopping for refueling at major international airports, where they sit on the tarmac like ticking biological time bombs.
“High over the beautiful countryside, passenger jets crisscrossed the sky, leaving white contrails behind them,” writes Richard Preston in The Hot Zone, this after recounting, in gory details, the progression of the Ebola-like Marburg virus on a man in central Africa (in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital, we read, his internal organs failed, and he “bleeds out” from every orifice).
The image of contrails crisscossing overhead, stitching distant places together, is an apt premonition of what comes later in the book — that of an outbreak of Ebola among a population of monkeys halfway around the world in Reston, Virginia, outside of Washington, DC, imported there on those white contrailed airplanes, and about to break out into the general population.
Our pustuled and hemorrhaging cargo will similarly pass over enchanting landscapes, leaving vaporous tracings for Ebola enthusiasts to track, eventually finding its way to highly specialized medical treatment centers, which from the outside look like typical suburban houses with picket fences and generic landscaping but are actually top secret Biosafety Level 4 labs.
In any case, there are other things of particular spatial interest to us.
There's his quarantine room, for instance, an isolation chamber with its own independent ventilation system, irradiated with ultraviolet lights, and where any normal conversation probably gets droned out by the beeps and whirrings of machinery, the technical mutterings of nurses and doctors, and benedictions from the worried. Or so we imagined. Who designs these rooms, one wonders. Are there any elements engineered purely out of aesthetics, surpassing any functional concerns, or is the former inherent in the latter? Is there a simulation epidemic chamber where they get tested, where one could inspect for leaks as one would assess a home inside an earthquake simulation hangar?
And there's that liminal space separating the patient from the outside world, that semi-impervious partition for preparation and decontamination. It's a zone of waiting, where one is possibly compelled to pray — Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me — while wondering what the cafeteria is offering for lunch today.
Etc.
Since we've obviously gone off in the fetid deep end, we'll mention one last thing: Wikipedia describes Reston, Virginia as “an internationally known planned community that revolutionized post-World War II concepts of land use and residential/corporate development in American suburbia.” And although the city was “planned before the term New Urbanism entered into mainstream use, in many ways it follows new urbanism guidelines.”
One can only therefore wonder here whether the Ebola outbreak represents a form of critique of New Urbanism and corporate landscapes, the same way AIDS, as Preston remarks, was an immuno-response by the earth to the human species creeping deeper and deeper into the jungle, clear cutting everything in sight for agriculture, diamonds and gold.
To put it in another way, urban planning can only be considered successful if it can spatially repel Nature's WMDs.
Taryn Simon will be taking us on a tour through the “weirdness hidden in plain sight — on our sidewalks, along our roadsides and in our public rituals and spectacles” next March in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in a volume available later that summer.
If you can't make it to the exhibition or can't wait for the book, The New York Times Magazine has published some of Simon's photographs, including the one above taken at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Contraband Room at the Kennedy International Airport: “Among the items seized from passengers in the 48 hours before the photograph was taken: African cane rats infested with maggots, Andean potatoes, Bangladeshi cucurbit plants, a pig’s head from South America.”
One wonders if these detention rooms might just be some of the most biologically diverse places in the lower 48 states.
Another photo takes a look inside the Avian Quarantine Facility New York Animal Import Center in Newburgh, New York. What we see caged are “African gray parrots and European finches, seized upon illegal importation into the U.S., in quarantine. Imported birds must undergo a 30-day mandatory quarantine in a U.S. Department of Agriculture animal-import facility. Before release, each bird is tested for avian influenza and exotic Newcastle disease.”
Again, seeing how empty the sky above Chicago is at the moment, one wonders if it's an ecological wasteland compared to these secret aviaries.
“A surface coated in spiky polymer molecules destroys the flu virus at a touch,” Scientific Americanreported last month. This nontoxic substance does so by “gouging holes in a microbe's cell wall and spilling out its contents. The polymer molecules stay rigid because they are all positively charged and therefore repel each other, like strands of hair standing on end from a static charge. The spikes have sufficiently few charges, however, that they can breach bacterial walls, which repel strongly charged molecules. The polymer probably neutralizes flu because the virus has an envelope around it suitable for spearing.”
As interesting as the image of viruses getting speared and eviscerated may sound, what is even more interesting is the fact that this “experimental substance, which can be applied like paint, might complement other germ control methods used in public spaces such as hospitals and airplanes.” So if the oft-forecasted influenza pandemic should come, those same public spaces will function more as biohazard filters instead of as urban vectors for the virus.
Even doubly more interesting is contemplating what possible landscapes this spiky paint and those “other germ control methods” might bring about. In fact, one cannot help but be giddy when one is reminded of the ubiquity of bollards, concrete planters, ha-has, and other topographical imprints of the Global War on Terror on our public spaces. And this despite their generally objectionable aesthetics.
So setting aside for now any and all skepticism of the polymer's ability to significantly mitigate some future species-ending plague, might we expect biocidal fountains to proliferate soon: like CCTV cameras, littering your daily commute, and misting you from the moment you exit your house till you finally settle down on your office chair? How about so-called respiratory oases retrofitted for the Ebola virus? Or benches, bathroom doorknobs, subway handrails, playground swings, elevator cars, and even nauseatingly boring public sculptures fostering an entirely new level of public intimacy? Etc.
Instead of barricading ourselves in our homes and bedchambers at the first sound of an ominous cough, we may prefer to seek shelter in our public spaces. Instead of avoiding it, we seek the crowd.
Is it possible to order a garden from Martha Stewart Omnipedia, and via 2-day priority mail, it arrives fully formed, plopped onto your front yard by the mailman?
Or better yet, what if your garden remains airborne, forever nomadic?
So you order from TrueValue.com, and before the end of the business day, it begins its perpetual migration. From Chicago then Beijing and Vladivostok, and then on to Dubai and all the major European cities before waiting out a 104-hour delay back in Chicago and continuing on its suborbital journey. From one aerotropolis to another aerotropolis, they are tended to by the US Postal Service, a legion of 24-hour phone order operators, cargo pilots, air marshalls, baggage handlers, and customs officers. But I wonder, are USDA airport inspectors competent gardeners?
On a clear day, you can see their complex Baroque compositions crisscrossing against a deterrestrialized groundplane. A hortus conclusus twice removed from the earth.
But you can still tend to it from your earthbound living room. Simply pick up one of the many home and garden catalogs littering your mailbox, or tune in to QVC and the Home Shopping Network, and order the necessary fertilizer, clippers, and that prize-winning new hybrid. It's only a phone call or a mouse click away. Tele-gardening.
And with this potentially lucrative market, Airbus just might save itself from dissolution.
When you need to take a look, simply hack into airport CCTV cameras; X-ray machines; TSA's chemical, biological and nuclear detection network; and air traffic control radars. Or track their migration through Google Earth.
Could these be the tracings of Paradise or the ominous tracks of a botanical invasion out to finish the native vegetation of England once and for all?
The Washington Monument will open this weekend in time for Independence Day celebrations in Washington, D.C. A refurbished landscape by Laurie Olin delineates a 400-foot security perimeter with an elliptical pathways lined with a 30-inch high retaining wall, a strategy that is part English ha-ha and part medieval moat. In a post 9/11 city and country where obtrusive Jersey barriers and closed access permeate the landscape, Olin's design finds a balance between the aesthetic gaze and contemporary realities.
