The first day when we came to the house we found some stuff, and we
imediately discovered that he was working with radiation. We found
all these photographs and x-rays, really intense information about
some of the studies and works that he did.
It was actually some of the best stuff, it was sitting in the driveway
and they were going to throw it away. We thought: "where's the rest of
it?". It turned out that they had already took a whole truckload of his
stuff to the dump, so we lost a lot of stuff that was here. What left
the house we don't know, but we have one clue that is the box that was
left outside with all the great stuff.
We do have three humongous file cabinets full of information, bits and
pieces about his life and work. We've been looking throug the notebooks,
files, diaries, letters, but nothing is pieced together. We don't know
exactly what he did, when he died, or what he died from.
He was this person that had all these inventions and ideas, we have all
his notebooks here, it's full of drawings and ideas, they're all stamped
secret. Everything that he was doing is in them. It's really interesting.
And there's all the books too, old dusty books,
and they're really cool scientific books like: "Empirical Equations",
"Pneumography", "Nuclear Fusion", "Chemical Analysys"... He also had all
these neat storage cabinets, where all his equipment was. There are still
labels on them: "photo suplies", "instruments", "wire", "infrared",
"fishing gear".
A lot of his stuff is kind of offensive. I like that. It puts you off at
first, but then after you look at it it's easy to understand why he was
doing it. From a modern perspective it's really disgusting, but at that
time it was all fresh and new, the studies he was in involved in were
really cutting-edge in that time.
He worked on harnessing the energy from the atom bomb, he developed one
of the first nuclear waste dumps. He started to get into a lot of smaller
projects later, a million different things. Everything is so extremely
over-well documented, there are multiple copies of everything he wrote.
There's so many things to do with all this documents. My interest is
making good documentary projects out of it. I want them to encompass
a whole range of projects and ideas all inspired by and about Jack
Dement, as well as our experience in this house. We really have a
sense that the house is his because his stuff is still here. There's
many science, military, government files. And yet it's in this domestic
environment.
We would like to have historians and librarians working with us in
this project. But we haven't decided yet about this, discussed it or
anything.
We've been here for four months now and it's still pretty inspiring to me.