My project explores the conditions in which secrets are generated and exposed, kept and disclosed; it questions the delineation of boundaries between those who know and those who don't while investigating systems of inclusion and exclusion conditioned by the secret, and the correspondent knowing and unknowing publics these systems determine. The project proposes a role for architecture in both elaborating and exposing conditions of secrecy, as well as in the fabrication of the realities that these conditions mask.

Developing within a collection of redacted documents - documents released under the guise of shared and free information, but documents, which through a process of erasure, elimination, and obscuration, reveal little in the way of tangible fact - the project operates through a fragmentary knowledge. Paranoia and conspiracy theorizing take shape, and a reality of UFOs, telepathy, mind control, and government surveillance is constructed.

As an extension of our contemporary information age, the documents hint at the promise of information made public – the promise of knowledge through accessibility and extended communications networks – but they disclose a reality of secrecy and mistrust and suggest processes of manipulation underlying the manufacture of public knowledge. And the drive to know – presupposed by the documents' release and inherent to and intensified by new media – elaborates a system of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking, a system in which more information is always available, and knowledge awaits if only it can be uncovered or disclosed.

The National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ), covering approximately 13,000 square miles of land in West Virginia and Virginia, uniquely frames these multiple anxieties of our contemporary information age. Designated as such in 1958 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the NRQZ is characterized by restrictions on radio and wireless transmission signals - restrictions that effectively disconnect the zone from broader communications networks while serving to protect the operations of two highly connected facilities around which the zone is centered. The first, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, WV, is home to a variety of radio telescopes that provide a means of engaging in a wide array of astronomical inquiry, ranging from gravitational radiation and planet composition, to star and galaxy formation, while ultimately probing the very origins of life. The second facility, the Naval Information Operations Command (NIOC) in Sugar Grove, WV, is a military base with a history rooted in Cold War intelligence gathering and current ties to the National Security Agency (NSA), assisting in the interception and de-encryption of communications entering the eastern United States as part of a program codenamed ECHELON.

The NRQZ is disconnected through its hyper-connectivity, existing simultaneously apart from and in exchange with the world outside it – blocked from but actively engaged in broader communications networks. The zone contrasts the uninformed with the highly informed, framing a conversation about information exchange in relation to notions of secrecy and paranoia. This is elaborated by the efforts of the two facilities within the zone, one seeking a knowledge unknowable through its astronomical research and one operating through knowledge withheld to conceal its surveillance program. So, in setting out to visit the NRQZ, I aimed to experience and document the disconnection and quietude that enables the connectivity of the zone, while uncovering the traces of paranoia latent within it.