CHASM is all about mysteries from long ago, beleifs and sciences long forgotton. The site evokes the loss of long-dead civilizations and events, their last vestiges hungering to tell a story that time has rendered illegible...
The installation that existed on the playa was devoid of any simple explanation, leaving visitors to come to their own conclusions. It is to these people who wish to keep their own personal experience of chasm that we say:
Read no more- Secrets, those
pesky night-lights in the dark rooms of mystery, are soon to follow.
For the gleefully determined, or the fatally curious, read on...
The metal tome created for Chasm was crafted by Raven Hannah, with contributions from a number of artists who toiled to create the scientific work left behind by those who created the Periscopes.
While meant to be examined and understood, the book was
not meant to be deciphered. The text is neither tibetan nor russian, not elvish
nor alien. It took for its inspiration two volumes. One is the Codex
Seraphinianus, itself an incredible work of art by Luigi Serafini. In its
pages a bizarre encyclopaedia of beasts, people, sciences and cultures parade
by. But every ounce of text is written in a fantastical script. The second inspiring
tome is even more bizarre, for it was created sometime in the late 1500's, and
has enthralled book collectors and linguists ever since- the Voynich
Manuscript. The script is totally untranslatable, and code-breakers and
linguists debate what information, if any, it actually contains. One clever
fellow created a font
of the script to help his colleagues in crackinng the uncrackable- and it is
this font that we have used for Chasmology.
So the pages of the book are untranslatable- but not unknowable. Chasmology
details the study of the site by the second, more technology-oriented culture
that visited the chasm. Diagrams, analysis of the soil, and technical illustrations
of the scientific implements used to probe the rift are scattered throughout
the book. Even stranger are the illustations of the strange objects seen through
the periscopes. It is worth noting that the pictograms left by the more primitive
culture are totally ignored in the tome.
For the even more curious, here's how the book was assembled: Aluminum plates were painted with copper spray paint, and then sheets of Lazertran were applied to the metal. The book's corners were coated in hand-sewn felt by Raven Hannah, the artist primarily responsible for its construction, content, and layout.
So is that all the book's secrets? Well, not exactly. There are some codes and secrets hidden inside Chasmology, and one of them can even be determined from the meager .jpg files of its pages...