The Owens Lake Studio

Wrestle with the earth forever
Botanists, satellites, and politicians
Dig, dry, destroy
The butterfly effect
Uncanny playspace
Turbine testing and wind on demand
Fluid dynamic domestication
So, is it beautiful?
Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring...
Moving the [atmospheric] river




Exhibition
Curatorial Conversation
Gallery
About





Moderator: Thank you everyone for joining us for this conversation with curators Gabe Saltzman and Chris Rancourt before we open up the exhibition. 

Today’s conversation funded by the California Land Use Grant, as well as grants from the Global Center for Dust Studies and Nimbus Weather Solutions. So, we'll chat for a few minutes with our curators about how they put the exhibit together, and then we'll have a chance to walk around and explore it ourselves. 

So, I'd like to begin with my kind of launch-in with the most pressing question. One of the central paradoxes is this perpetual need for human intervention and labor on the site. Can you talk more about that?


Rancourt:  Yeah, I think from the start we were both really fascinated with this kind of original sin of draining the lake. Now our presence has to be there in perpetuity for maintaining this lake for the rest of human existence. 

So, it was kind of an amazing thought to think that, okay, we have to maintain this dry lake bed for the rest of existence. But also just thinking about the labor involved in doing that, it's physical labor. It's all visceral. There's switches, there's valves. It's a very weird thing to think about, especially when you're there. 

But we were able to get in touch with Eric, who was a worker there on site. And he provided us these amazing archive of images of the worker's perspective and just how much work and what that looks like. So, you'll see that in the exhibit. I think it's quite powerful.


Moderator: Yeah, can you give us an example of the scope of that labor? 


Saltzman: Yeah, you saw some in the video. That's the 2002 scope, which has now expanded many, many times. The lake itself is basically the size of the San Fernando Valley.

So, you've got a snippet of what they're doing there, foot by foot, meter by meter, the woman in the tractor. But that just goes on at this massive scale. 

We have a story a little bit about the botanist, which we think is a wonderful example of someone whose task at the lake is to record, verify, observe plant species, butterflies, birds, really counting at the meter by meter scale. Who’s observations and data has to be corroborated, actually, by satellite imagery. And there's this amazing dissonance between her and her team getting out their meter grids and then correlating that with the 30-meter pixel or the kilometer of the satellite. And then this information makes its way very far away from the lake to state offices, where decision makers and stakeholders are then reviewing it in this bizarre way.

And then somehow, you could say the information even gets passed back, so that it comes all the way back and trickles back down to these workers on ground level, which is kind of fascinating and a hard story to tell. 


Moderator: That is fascinating, because it sounds like information is being extracted there at a very intense level. And I'm wondering, is material extracted to the same extent, or are they both at the same time?


Saltzman: You can definitely say material is extracted.

I think the long history of the lake is really one of extraction. Number one, the water. In 1913, Mulholland diverted and started the aqueduct.

If you took a shower this morning, 35% of that water should have gone to Owens Lake. 

So the water has sort of trickled down here. That was the big, first notable extraction. But that really sort of gave license, the sort of visceral aggression of that extraction and carving that aqueduct 200-something miles, really gave license for a lot of mining to follow that got increasingly mechanized and industrial in the 20th century. 


Moderator: And is the kind of, have we been continuing this history, or have we learned from it and taken a more delicate or light-headed approach at all?


Rancourt: It's definitely changed a lot since then. I think the environmental issues are kind of paramount these days.

I mean, the butterfly is kind of, the silver spot butterfly is kind of a perfect example of that. It's this kind of species that migrated to the site. It's endangered, but it's only federally protected. In California, we don't consider insects protected by an endangered species. So LEDWPs kind of have this issue of trying to protect this butterfly and trying to fight it in the courts. And they ended up losing.

So any time they find the breeding ground of one of these butterfly clusters, they have to kind of cordon off the area, stop all work. And yeah, it's kind of fascinating. The work changes from dust mitigation to then conservation.

And it's kind of amazing that this little butterfly has the weight of the federal government. So when it lands on site, it just shuts things down. And there's a lot of other cultural baggage attached to that that you'll see in the exhibit as well.


Moderator: That's a fascinating example. Has the DWP worked at all for the butterfly? 


Saltzman: Yeah, I mean, I think you could say they have. I’d say wind fences are sort of maybe a great example of that. It's probably the most delicate dust control measure that the DWP uses. Learning from the butterfly, maybe you could argue that the wind fences are sort of a very one-to-one blocker device of wind, sort of perpendicular to the prevailing direction of the wind. But they're imperfect in their own way. They're easy to set up. But eventually they'll block wind for like 20 or 30 meters afterwards, and then wind will find its way back. 

But over time, the sand sort of piles up against them. So they eventually form these dunes, which was not part of the plan, I don't think. And then kids come and sled on the dunes, and then they have to move the fence. And it's just sort of this big, unintended, odd situation.


Moderator: Wow. So, I mean, what are alternative approaches? Are there for the wind fences? 


Rancourt: Yeah, I mean, they've been quite heavy-handed in some of their explorations of how to mitigate dust. In fact, they built this testing facility because, well, to test any kind of dust mitigation strategy, it takes about three years to get that strategy approved. And a lot of stakeholders are involved in that process. So they ended up devising this facility that, in their mind, would cut that down to about two and a half months. 

They were able to test at scale and on the location by using these decommissioned jet engines and blowing wind at high velocities across a strip of land, which I know sounds ridiculous.


Saltzman: It's not the wind fencing. It's heavy-handed. 


Rancourt: Yeah.

So, I mean, some would say that it's not even that effective, and it's cost millions of dollars to kind of make this facility. So some would say, like, why even do something like that? Yeah. I don't know.


Moderator: It is, after all, a testing facility, right?


Saltzman: Right. Yeah. I mean, it's super noisy as well, which is a whole other thing.

They have a lot of testing facilities. I mean, one of the amazing things about Owens Lake is that it's now sort of a global example of what a phenomenon that will happen increasingly to lakes around the world due to climate change. So Owens Lake had this sort of artificial head start being drained, or the water was diverted away. But scientists are coming from all over the world to sort of study what's going to happen to their lakes for a different reason. So an amazing thing they just opened up at the lake is a new fluid dynamic research center.

If you sort of dial everything back, the two biggest operative forces here are water, which was taken away but still trickles in, and then spring, like snowmelt that sort of can surge in. It's happening right now. And wind. 

So water and wind are like the two central forces on the lake. And, you know, coincidentally or not, they're both fluid dynamic forces.  I think humans have a good understanding of both of them in isolation, but when you start to layer them, things become exponentially more complicated.


Moderator: I mean, it sounds like wind has been a destructive force all along in this lake. Is that always the case? 


Rancourt: Well, yes. I mean, there's destruction...  

Not a lot of people know about this, but in 1989, Christo had kind of eyed Owens Lake as one of his backdrops for a project that, unfortunately, was never realized. They had this vision of kites, yellow kites, all above Owens Lake and kind of calling attention to this environmental disaster.

I mean, the drawings are beautiful. We were given a couple of replica drawings that you can see. 

But, like I said, unfortunately, it never happened because LADWP and Los Angeles were very against the idea of kind of drawing that public attention to an environmental disaster. They hadn't started their work of mitigation yet. So it's really unfortunate that it never kind of came to be. 


Moderator: But the whole proposal, kind of, even though it was unrealized, makes me think, you know, was there ever a plan to encourage any kind of public access or tourism? 


Rancourt: I mean, I think the idea for it was more about drawing attention, but there has been kind of a more recent draw of tourism that I would say is unintended by LADWP, where they have these brine pools that are basically salt crusts, and within these salt crests are halite crystals. And, I mean, as a lot of us in LA know, there's a big crystal culture here.

So people travel to the lake and they're extracting these crystals out of the lake and causing all sorts of problems along the way and really getting in the way of the dust mitigation there. We have a small story about that. It's kind of this new viral trend that's kind of becoming a big problem there.


Moderator: So I know Owens Lake is, after all, public land. So how does that play into who is and isn't welcome? 


Saltzman: Right. That's hard.

LADWP can't keep those people out if they're blocking the tractor, collecting a crystal... I'm not sure what happens. 

One of the problems is that there's a lot of sort of chatter, increasingly now, online about sort of conspiracy theories about what might be happening here. It's a vast place. There's something very difficult, I think, for us studying the lake and for casual observers or remote online observers. It's very difficult about comprehending something so unbelievable and incomprehensible in scale. I mean, when you go, you just cannot see the intents of it at all. And there's always something out of view that might be happening, and that's not helped at all by an extreme overpopulation of sensors on the site.

So we've documented a few of those or more than a few. There are sensors everywhere that LADWP has to monitor and track. They're attacking this whole project, the dust control with like 60 or 70 workers so they need a sort of army of sensors and information collecting. And then I think certain people sort of drive by and notice that... and it's beeping at night, and it's making weird noises...

I'm not exactly sure what all the sensors are for. 


Moderator: Are any of those conspiracy theories close to real? 


Rancourt: Well, I'm not so sure about what we found on Discord being true.

But we did find some kind of bizarre stuff that we both didn't believe at first but is real. And that's the cloud seeding efforts that are happening there. They contracted this company Nimbus to kind of come and cloud seed the valley. Essentially what they're trying to do is channel atmospheric rivers to come through the Owens Valley.

When we read about this, we were like, there's no way this is real.

And then we started looking, and apparently, yeah, you shoot silver iodide into a cloud or you dust it with a plane, and you can extract water out of clouds. So they're using the Owens Valley as this kind of catch basin and extracting as much water as they can.

In fact, this year, there was 300% snowpack in this year at Nevada Mountains. And I mean, the whole thing is now in danger. The whole operation on Owens Lake is in danger of being just washed out.


Saltzman: Yeah, there's always these great ironies. Like, now it's being washed out because maybe they planted too much water... 

There are rumors on Discord about that being the cause of our wet spring, but I can’t speak to that.


Moderator: That's geoengineering for you. Well, this was very informative. It's been great to have a chat with you.

I'd like to invite now our audience to explore the exhibits for about 15 minutes. And then we'll reconvene for a Q&A. Thanks so much.