Elliot Anderson's "The Monuments of Silicon Valley"

The Nonsite Collective welcomes you to join us this Saturday, June 26th for the first of a suite of summer events constellated around the notion of the commons. Reading from Robert Smithson’s The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey Elliot Anderson (UC Santa Cruz Professor of Electronic Media) invites participants to formulate questions that interrogate the Superfund Site as monument and commons. To locate the text in the contemporary landscape Anderson will screen images from his project The Monuments of Silicon Valley.


He writes, "On Saturday, September 30, 1967 Robert Smithson travels to the post-industrial lands along the Passaic River in a mytho-poetic search for entropic monuments of the late 20th century. The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey is a testament to an irreversible ahistoric future. The 21st century has its own monuments dedicated to waste and decay. Contemporaneous with Smithson’s expedition Silicon Valley was erecting its monuments to a future technologically determined entropic panorama. Monuments constructed as ruins of an absolute obsolescence."


Please join us at the Kala Gallery (1060 Heinz Avenue, Berkeley) this Saturday at 2pm for what promises to be an enlightening conversation!