Concealed Command(ment)s asks what it means to believe in a landscape structured by secrecy. Nuclear history is reconstructed not as singular past event but as ritual system performed across deserts, archives, thresholds, and bureaucratic interiors. It moves from ignition to inheritance: from the detonation at Trinity as a moment of genesis, to the choreography of controlled visitation and nuclear tourism, to the global spread of nuclear ideology as belief structure.

Desks become altars. Bombs become relics. Drawings act less like proposals and more like acts of witnessing.

The stakes lie in how we read, record, and construct spaces of power. Architecture is not a neutral backdrop to history. It is complicit in its staging. Whether in a field, a drawer, a shrouded cabinet, or a saturation of red, these spaces carry charged consequences.

Triptych: Genesis, Ritual, and Dominion
The triptych operates as a constructed theology, reassembling the Western canon into nuclear genesis, ritual, and dominion.
Three iconic Renaissance and Baroque paintings are redeployed for their cultural weight and mythological recognition.

Genesis (The Creation of the Nuclear Bomb)

The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo, 1512) by becomes atomic origin story, framing the birth of nuclear power as a moment of sublime creation. The bomb’s detonation was not just a technological breakthrough but a near mythic event, a sublime rupture that fused scientific ingenuity with a near religious sense of revelation.

Ritual (Test Site Pilgrimages & Restricted Access)

The Last Supper (Leonardo da Vinci, 1495–1498) situates the ritualized accessibility of nuclear test sites within the origins
of Christian communion, where Christ’s sacrifice became a cyclical act of remembrance. Just as the Eucharist transforms flesh and blood into symbolic sustenance, these annual or limited nuclear site visitations serve as both commemoration and justification for the persistence of nuclear power. The act of witnessing these sites,  much like partaking in communion,
reinforces a relationship between authority, spectacle, and devotion where restricted access and controlled revelation uphold systems of power.

Dominion (Nuclear Domination)

Triumph of Christianity (Tommaso Laureti, 1585) positions nuclear proliferation within the framework of ideological conquest. Depicting the eradication of pagan symbols in favor of Christian rule mirrors the way nuclear supremacy was wielded as both a political and cultural force. Just as Baroque religious art glorified the subjugation of the “other,” the nuclear era transformed
landscapes, histories, and global hierarchies under the guise of security and progress.

Trinity Site: The Birthplace
The global spread of nuclear influence follows logics of symbolic authority, repetition, territorial installation. Nuclear dominion 
becomes a belief that is exported, repeated, naturalized.

The detonation at the Trinity Site on July 16, 1945, marks the physical and mythological origin of the nuclear landscape. Here, the earth itself became the archive. Glassified, cratered, and inscribed with a new form of authorship. This drawing situates fission as both event and belief structure.

The bomb’s ignition is rendered not as explosion, but as inscription, but a diagram of energy release, calibration, and command.The Trinity Site becomes the ground zero of naming, where nuclear language begins: Trinity, Gadget, Ground Zero, Fallout.

The fissure between matter and meaning that begins here extends through the work across rituals of access, architectures of command, and the encoded horizon that follows.The triptych operates as a constructed theology, reassembling the Western canon into nuclear genesis, ritual, and dominion. Three iconic Renaissance and Baroque paintings are redeployed for their cultural weight and mythological recognition.





The Nuclear Horizon
The drawing operates as an evidentiary field, a surface where data, residue, and constructed rituals are arranged not to 
clarify but to  calibrate. It is not a map, but a condition: a horizon where fallout, inscription, protest, and witness coexist in encoded form.

The field is dotted with craters, artifacts, and fragments, each one collected, bagged, and archived. These are not leftovers, but performative residues. Partial plans and section cuts of the McDonald Ranch House at the Trinity Site are stitched in as spatial ghosts of test site interiors, containment structures, and bureaucratic thresholds. Together, the field proposes the nuclear horizon not as edge or view, but as an evidentiary bandwidth, a frequency field where time, space, and ideology become measurable yet only partially legible.




The Nuclear Horizon: Archival Devices
Across the drawing, tuning fork devices read, receive, and emit. They trace protest discourse as much as military signal. Suspended between instrument and artifact, they mediate between the occupied, visible landscape and the nuclear horizon, a field of residual evidence, fallout, and encoded memory.

They record, translate, and re-inscribe vibrations from past detonations, protest chants caught in wind corridors, and sonic debris from overflights. Their saturation in signal-bleed red marks them as agents of interference. They are field archivists in architectural form, performing the labor of listening and inscribing. Each casts three shadows that conflict and overlap, refusing resolution. Multiplicity here is not ornamental but epistemological.




The Resolute Desk
The Oval Office becomes the original broadcast site of nuclear revelation. On August 6, 1945, President Truman delivered a prepared statement from behind the Resolute Desk announcing the bombing of Hiroshima. The desk is reimagined not as an instrument of governance but as an altar of aftermath, staged as still life. Each object carries the weight of detonation without spectacle: the pocket watch set to 8:15 a.m., the white gloves of sterile interaction, the MacDonald Ranch House floor plans, and gold-leafed relics bagged and sealed. These are not commemorative objects, but functional remains, stitched together into a composition that sits between archive and ritual, control and complicity.

The desk appears again, partially withdrawn and draped in white cloth. It evokes both forensic cover and sacred shroud. This image does not conclude the work, but positions it. Rendering does not clarify, it obscures. Drawings hold charged characters in their open drawers and cracked doors. The act of drawing becomes a form of encryption. Architecture becomes a container for belief systems we cannot fully parse.

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