Great Salt Lake Exploration Platform CHRIS TAYLOR Texas Tech University ABSTRACT ORIGIN The Great Salt Lake Exploration Platform is a cre- Primary motivation to create the Great Salt Lake Exploration Platform ative machine built to foster visual and performative began in 2005 when Matt Coolidge took Steve Badgett and Chris 1 research within the vastly under explored situated Taylor for a drive on a bombing range south of Wendover, Utah. Venturing not for military engagement, but to examine brine col- locale of the Great Salt Lake. GLSEP is a modular, flex- lection canals of the Intrepid Potash company who extract minerals ibly deployable craft for a small group of people to in large evaporation ponds by first collecting ground water through remain upon the lake for limited durations of time, open canals extending for miles through the Great Salt Lake Desert. make work, and not die. Given the remote severity The idea emerged to consider building a craft, a salt boat, to allow of this landscape the qualifier is significant. Storms people to work and spend time in these rarely visited canals. The proj- appear quickly and can generate ten to twelve foot ect remained a stray possibility until 2012 when Badgett and Taylor waves in tight oscillation. Coupled with the water’s assembled a grant proposal for the Graham Foundation for Advanced chemical density the lake is known to literally tear Studies in the Fine Arts. The application coalesced our interests within the basin of the Great Salt Lake. News of the award meant the boats apart. Rather than being built and powered as proposition had to evolve from possibility to actuality. Shortly after a boat, with need of a marina to launch and a geom- the Graham funding a Creative Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences etry to accommodate overland travel, the GSLEP is a Research Award for the project was received from Texas Tech deployable assembly providing necessary life support University.2 and research infrastructure (shade, fresh water, food and waste storage, solar power, communications, CREATIVE MACHINES and evacuation provisions) to researchers operating The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), SIMPARCH, and Land Arts on the Great Salt Lake, akin to off planet missions of the American West at Texas Tech University are creative machine authoring works that produce other works to propel the actions of oth- with immanent dangers and very limited rescue ers. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, formed in 1994, creates opportunities. exhibitions, public programs and projects, that explore “the nature and It can be difficult to imagine unexploited terrestrial sites for explo- extent of human interaction with the surface of the earth, and in finding ration. The remoteness of the Antarctic, Eurasian Steppe, and new meanings in the intentional and incidental forms that we individu- Sub-Saharan Africa have been rendered visible by the increasing ally and collectively create.”3 SIMPARCH is an art collaborative founded ability of people with new media technologies to access and connect by Steve Badgett and Matt Lynch in 1996. While operating within the to once remote places. Despite the opportunity of new capabilities, arena of visual art SIMPARCH makes legible propositions of visionary much remains to be examined in our own backyards. The potency futures, energy horizons, and cultural aspiration. DYI directness drives of primary research — first-person truth on the ground — remains an aesthetic and conceptual ethos manifest in the fabrication and tra- paramount for architects, artists, and culture workers operating jectory of their work.4 Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech among the complex realities of the built environment. GSLEP initial University began in 2008 as a “semester long transdisciplinary field test launch occurred in May 2015. The 2016 field season advanced program expanding the definition of land art through direct experience operational knowledge and began the search for involvement from a with the full range of human interventions in the landscape… Land Arts wide range researchers from artists, architects, and writers to design- investigates the intersection of geomorphology and human construc- ers, scientists, and historians. tion beginning with the land and extending through the complex social and ecological processes that produce contemporary landscapes. It is a Design Strategies Cross-Americas: Probing Disglobal Networks 135 Figure 1: Within the Great Salt Lake Exploration Platform off Antelope Island, construct a new 180 foot bridge to breach the causeway and allow lake Utah, 17 June 2016. Photograph by Chris Taylor. levels and chemistry to balance.9 Given the shallow geomorphology of the basin, changes in the quantity of water entering profoundly impact semester abroad in our own back yard where each fall students venture lake size, shoreline location and chemical composition. across the American southwest camping for a two months while traveling six-thousand miles overland.”5 The opportunity of GSLEP emerges from EXPERIMENTATION the interactions between Coolidge, Badgett and Taylor and their collec- As work on GSLEP began we sought experience from people working tive desire to expand thresholds of awareness and capacity for people to on the lake such as visiting with a brine shrimper who relayed stories operate in under examined landscapes. CLUI is the operational benefi- of massive waves generated in the middle of the lake by storms. During ciary of GSLEP and will solicit, organize, and manage resident projects.6 the winter shrimping season he was alone in a spotting vessel when The late science fiction writer J.G. Ballard focused on what might hap- sustained wave impacts flattened the hull of his boat within seconds. pen within his immediate surroundings in the next 15 minutes. Ballard’s Fortunately he was able to issue a Mayday radio call and forty-five later articulation of the possibilities within the immediate now, directs atten- minutes he was rescued from the twenty-eight degree water — lucky to tion to the under explored landscapes within our field of view rather than have survived. Beyond the obvious design imperative of avoiding being in some far off land.7 on the lake in February his story made real a set of serious design issues. The forces of the lake are too great for us to fight directly. Our design CONDITION had to embrace engineered performance and operational anticipation to The Great Salt Lake Desert is North America’s backyard collecting land- avoid catastrophe. The Great Salt Lake Marina harbor master has told us uses, building programs, and expounding material history expelled from directly, numerous times, that he has navigated waters all over the world other parts of the United States. The Great Salt Lake is the lowest por- and this lake is the least predictable and most dangerous body of water tion of this desert and a remnant of prehistoric Lake Bonneville. It has he has experienced. Going on to say that people who are cavalier about no drain. It’s an “entropic sink.” A terminal landscape. Slowly grinding the elements usually find themselves in dire trouble. With contemporary everything to geologic flatness of silt and salt. As a fundamentally inhos- narratives reinforcing historical accounts of lake conditions we began pitable landscape (no fish live there), the Great Salt Lake holds unique a design process that could not rely on precedent or prototype. We and extreme architectural challenges for even temporary occupation. adopted a design ethos akin to off planet missions, attempting to antici- Robert Smithson made such challenges visible by including the following pate the difficulty or near impossibility of rescue. Our approach had to passage in his film Spiral Jetty (1970): “the notion that the lake must be include provisions for survival and self sustenance with aspirational refer- connected to the Pacific Ocean, by subterranean channel at the head of ences ranging from Ciudad Abierta venturing by sea to Patagonia thru the which a huge whirlpool threatened the safety of the lake craft, was not Pacific Northwest to outer space, examining the hydrofoils by Alexander dispelled until 1870’s long after people should’ve known better. As a -mat Graham Bell and Dymaxion logics of Buckminster Fuller.10 ter of fact, ‘eyewitnesses’ reported the location of the whirlpool about The fundamental design goal of our craft was to allow a small group midway between Fremont and Antelope Islands.”8 of people to remain upon the lake for limited durations of time, Yet the Great Salt Lake is more complex than geology and myth. It is make work, and not die. Given the remote severity of this landscape essentially two bodies of water divided by a rail line called the Lucin the final qualifier is significant. The other essential design imperative Cutoff first built on an open wood trestle in the early 1900s and filled was to create a modularly deployable platform that could enter the solid with gravel in the late 1950s. While narrow cuts through the cause- lake from any point, without the aid of a marina, so the entire struc- way attempted to allow lake levels to balance, the earthen structure ture had to be demountable into components that a few people created two distinct ecologies between the northern and southern arms. could carry or cart from road to water. The majority of fresh water inflows to the southern portion, which runs The design process began with small tests of various forms and three to five times saltier than sea water carrying a greenish appearance. by investigating electric propulsion systems. To operate with solar Microscopic halophilic bacteria thrive in the super saline saturated north- power the roof area has a direct impact on the amount of electricity ern arm giving the water its milky red cast — a key trait that attracted we can generate.