(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, think about the world from the perspective of rocks.

(Rani) Art is a mechanism to alchemize human experiences.

(Tom) A diamond anniversary for a local iris society.

(Kevin) My granddaughter says I'm assessed and just her word for obsessed, just kind of where I'm at with the flowers.

(Tom) Poet Richard Siken reads the way the light reflects.

(Richard) Thick and rude and imaginary because there is no separation.

(Tom) And the digitization effort pays off, breathing new life into our historic archives.

So that if we can get past 13th century period, this possibility of a painting or a forgery of medieval times.

Hello and welcome to a brand new season of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm your host, Tom McNamara, and this is the 12th year of our documentary style program, but it's the 45th year that Arizona Illustrated has been on the air.

That's a tradition we're very proud of and want to continue on.

It's also the final season that we'll produce the program from here in the modern languages building at the University of Arizona.

The Baker Center, our new state of the art facility is under construction and we'll likely be moving there in early 2026.

We'll have more on the move in the future episodes and more on our 45th anniversary later in this show.

But for now, let's get to some stories.

For Rani Olson, rocks are poems, memories, mirrors that are very much alive and listening.

In this process oriented artist's current body of work, she asked the profound question, what does the world look like from the vantage point of rocks?

♪ CALM PIANO MUSIC None of this would exist.

None of the plants, us, none of the organic material in life would happen without the existence of these rocks.

This is a rock planet and these are the stories of these rocks.

Maybe all of life is just about rocks wanting to have a different kind of experience.

And we are made up of these rocks and these chemicals and that process is inside of us.

Those memories are inside of us and then we go back into the Earth.

I've been making art my whole life.

I attribute that to my mom.

Growing up, the things that I was most interested in was math and art.

I really love making sense of structures.

I got into the process of understanding human connection with rocks.

From the vantage point of rocks, how does the world look?

I kept wanting to suspend rocks.

And I finally did it.

That was such a physically aggressive thing.

And so I left the rock part.

I brought harvested clay back in and started creating shapes that looked like rocks that were made from harvested clay.

Well, what if I just allowed the clay to just be clay?

Behind me is kind of where that ended up.

(Dian) I've had the really fortunate experience of watching Rani put this together.

The lighting was a part of the art and creates not just a sense of mood but actually changes the shapes of the items in the gallery.

It adds to what you're reading.

♪ ORCHESTRAL MUSIC ♪ ORCHESTRAL MUSIC (Tom) We both have a space here in Subspace.

We're both practicing artists that share studio spaces in the basement of the Steinfeld warehouse.

- I wonder if it's in the last six months that like stuff is so uneasy right now?

(Tom) People have all different types of like working hours, but Rani and I seem to be the ones that are always here in the morning.

So we spent a lot of time talking about art and the things that influence our art.

There is a big connection between like process.

Rani is definitely like a process oriented artist who takes a lot of care.

I've been like kind of blown away as she's talked about all of the different processes that she's used throughout her practice.

♪ ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC (Rani) It's the process of me going down these rabbit holes and finding these little mirrors in them.

And I'm not intending to.

This story that I'm understanding about a particular material.

I'm really relating to that in my own experience of the concept of permanence or the concept of change or the concept of coming back to oneself.

Art is a mechanism to alchemize human experiences.

The fall of my sophomore year of college, my sister died suddenly, and she was like my best friend and my family.

We had kind of been through everything together.

The grief was debilitating.

It's one thing to process it, and it's another thing to kind of move it into something else.

Art was really the saving grace for me.

It's just been this kind of like side thing that I've done to keep myself excited and interested and sane.

♪ CALM PIANO MUSIC (Clare) Rani has engaged with people who struggle with addiction.

A piece of that exhibit has to do with recovery Her exhibit really asks you what is being recovered?

Is it the inner child?

Is it you know, relationships with ourselves or others?

There are so many answers.

(Rani) Plaster has this memory when it's introduced with water.

It heats itself up and then it hardens It just immediately transforms back into what its previous self was chemically.

There's something about that that just feels so incredibly poetic to me.

There's some memory that we know it like immediately goes back into our core.

Even if it's lost again, when we're reintroduced with that again it is completely accepted.

The cycle just keeps repeating.

(Jay) She's channeling something, whether it's subconscious or from the cosmic or whatever, that is really what her art is about and using the materials and the process that she goes through.

I'll see her doing something totally new or different, and it's something I've never seen before.

(Rani) The sweeping video and projection, as well as the broom, started with my exploration into my ancestry.

And what is the story of grass?

The broom that's hanging is an Appalachian-style broom that I made.

Grass grows up from soil and rocks, and then we're flipping it upside down, and we're using it to move rocks and move dust and move soil with you forward, and that it's also like touching back on the earth.

The irony of that, like, what are we moving forward?

What can we do as a people to start looking at the things that we're not really looking at?

A lot of the work that I engage in is, I think, just being at peace with what is, like learning how to be with discomfort and grief and becoming new again, right?

Learning different ways of being in the world, and it's an exploration, and I think of it like rocks, you know, like they're constantly moving around and shape-shifting and doing all of these things, like isn't that true with everything always?

You know, it seems like 2025 is a great year for milestone anniversaries.

We're marking our show's 45th and the Tucson Area Iris Society is celebrating their 60th year as a group and in all those years, they've been encouraging people to plant and grow and show these beautiful drought tolerant plants all around the region.

♪ UPBEAT GUITAR My name is Joyce Knill, and I'm a member of the Tucson Area Iris Society.

♪ UPBEAT GUITAR I discovered the Iris Society about 25 years ago and they were having a show, and I joined the club, but I was working all the time, so I really couldn't participate until about five years ago, and try to grow irises here in the desert, which is totally different than trying to grow them in Minnesota or Illinois.

So it was a challenge, but I have to say, the members of the club were instrumental in giving me advice, helping me solve my problems, never making fun of my failures, and guiding us.

♪ UPBEAT GUITAR I am Kevin Kartchner.

I am president of the Iris Society in Tucson.

Today, we're at an iris show.

This is a combined show with the Rose Society.

If you look at the flowers that we have here, they are something that you can actually grow in Tucson.

A lot of people do not think you can grow flowers as delicate and impressive as they are.

I like to call them desert orchids, not that they have any relationship, but they're something that's spectacular that can be grown here in the desert.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC Iris are fairly drought tolerant.

You don't have to water them a whole lot, so that makes them a nice, low-water addition to your garden.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC They don't get any pests to speak of.

They aren't bothered by, say, javelinas or other animals, like rabbits that might eat your other things you're trying to grow.

The biggest challenge we have is probably in monsoon season, because they're rhizomes, rhizomes if they get too wet, can rot.

And so when it's humid and soaking rains, some of them can rot and die.

It just became my favorite flower over many years, just because of the huge diversity of colors and shapes of the flower.

All of us in the Iris and Rose Society are gardeners in general.

We just tend to specialize in something.

Being an engineer, I keep track of everything, so I have probably about 400 Iris varieties growing out here in the garden.

And you can see from the tags, they're all named with a little bit of information about each one of them.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC As far as total plants, you can take the number of varieties and multiply that by a dozen or so, and then you just quickly come up with, there's thousands of plants out here, and each one of those with multiple flowers.

So you're looking at thousands of flowers today.

I don't want to calculate how much time goes into this, because I don't want to know.

This time of year in the spring, it's not work at all.

I just kind of wander around the plants and take inventory of things and do a little bit of hybridizing or breeding.

The most work would probably be in the fall.

When they get too crowded, they need to be divided, and then they have to actually be dug up, and the digging and dividing and replanting, that's the work.

My granddaughter says I'm assessed, and just her word for obsessed, but that's just kind of where I'm at with the flowers, and right now I have the space and time to take care of too many of them.

(Joyce) I live on the east side, which is a little bit chilly, very little rain for the last ten years.

I have over a hundred irises in my backyard.

I grow some in ground, I grow some in raised beds, and then also I grow some in very large pots.

I grow the full gamut, I grow historic irises, which are over 30 years old, and that is something I'm just interested in.

I love the form of some of the very old irises, but then I also, every year when I get the new catalogs, I have to order even more.

I'm addicted.

I can forget about buying new clothes, but I have to have new irises.

I grew up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota.

My mom enjoyed flowers.

My father raised corn and soybeans and alfalfa, so we were surrounded by plants always.

There was an iris hybridizer that lived outside of the small town.

My mother, every single spring when those irises were blooming, my sister and I would tag along with mom and go admire all the irises, and mom would choose one iris to bring home to the farm.

So my sister and I both share those memories, and we still share that love of iris, and we have had iris in our lives pretty much since then.

This is our front yard.

I love to have the neighbors stop by and admire the plants.

It doesn't matter their age or their sex.

I have little boys who are around 10 years old who come and stand at the sidewalk and point out different flowers.

And when I catch them, they always tell me how much they enjoy being here.

There's a little girl who's just learning how to talk, but she has the word flower figured out.

And she comes by with her mom and dad in a stroller, and she points out flowers, and so she's saying, "Flowers, flowers, flowers."

All the way past here.

And then every now and then during the summer, we find little surprises tucked in next to plants.

I've received painted rocks, and one time I found a little plastic dinosaur tucked in with one of my plants, which I just think it's great.

Maybe this means there's some hope that future generations will become gardeners as well.

Now we bring you the first in a new seven part series.

We've teamed up with the Poetry Center to bring you poems written by local poets and then visualized by our team of producers.

It's the second time we've collaborated on this with the Poetry Center and we're anxious to share these experimental films with you.

So first up, here's Richard Siken reading "The Way the Light Reflects."

[ BIRD CHIRPING ] The paint doesn't move the way the light reflects, so what's there to be faithful to?

I am faithful to you, darling.

I say it to the paint.

The bird floats in the unfinished sky with nothing to hold it.

The man stands, the day shines.

His insides and his outsides kept apart with an imaginary line-- thick and rude and imaginary, because there is no separation, fallacy of the local body, paint on paint.

I have my body, and you have yours.

Believe it if you can.

Negative space is silly.

When you bang on the wall, you have to remember you're on both sides of it already, but go ahead, yell at yourself.

Some people don't understand anything.

They see the man, but not the light, they see the field, but not the varnish.

There is no light in the paint, so how can you argue with them?

They are probably right anyway.

I paint in his face, and I paint it out again.

There is a question I am afraid to ask: to supply the world with what?

[ MUSEUM CHATTER ] Richard Siken's latest book of poetry called I Do Know Some Things from Copper Canyon Press was just Longlisted for the National Book Award and he'll be doing a reading at the University of Arizona Poetry Center on Thursday, October 9th with another poet we featured on our show, Mathias Svalina.

If you missed the reading or you're watching this afterwards, you can stream it on the Poetry Center's website, poetry.arizona.edu Well, as we mentioned earlier, this is the 45th anniversary of Arizona Illustrated on the air.

And to commemorate that, we're going to show you something special and someone special.

This is John Booth, the man who hired me, has a long history with Arizona Illustrated, a long history.

AZPM, many, many years you retired now.

I am.

You've earned it.

It's great.

But you were hauled back into duty for a digitization project, say that three times fast.

Taking old footage from all the years of AZ Illustrated and making it into something digital.

Tell us about that.

Right.

And the collection actually is well beyond Arizona Illustrated.

Yeah.

It speaks, it's standalone programs, it's stuff we shot for the U of A commencement dating back to the 80s.

But there are easily 12,000 assets, tapes, whatever, in there.

And we got a grant to cover the prioritization of which things should be digitized and which shouldn't.

And then at the end of the day, last six months ago or so, I sent the last shipment off to the center and they're digitizing everything so that you can play it on a computer.

Because these tapes and everything, they will degrade and the footage will be lost forever.

This is called a one inch tape.

One inch, yeah.

This is actually the 1989 U of A commencement.

And that's what it looked like.

There you go.

It doesn't, it doesn't, it looks a little bit like a film and they're heavy.

But this is one program.

As we progress through different formats, three quarter inch tape, you had many different stories.

Not only did their size change, I mean, look at this.

Yeah.

From the 2000s where, this is 2004.

The other thing is you could fit a lot more on each of these.

So we, where a film is one asset, we got, we have tapes that had 15 different Arizona illustrated stories and we have 1200 of them.

These tapes, they deteriorate over time.

The video fades, the sound, they get pretty murky and mushy, you know.

So what you've done now, it'll maintain the quality that you were able to push over.

Yeah, it was such forward thought of Arizona Public Media to look and see that they had this room over in Harvill.

Build with this stuff dating back to the 60s, moving into a new building soon, unbelievable, but it's time to get out of the basement of Modern Languages.

And they realize this stuff is going to go away and we don't want to move at all.

So we got a grant through the Mellon Foundation and through GBH and the American Archive of Public Media.

And all of these will be in the cloud, word searchable by anybody on the planet and little videos of each story and such each tape will pop up and you'll be able to watch any of it and it will be preserved, all of it in the Library of Congress.

One of those stories is about the Shroud of Turin.

That's going to be the first one we present to you.

You shot that story, tell us about it.

Well, like I told you, I've got a lot of stories.

I can't remember them.

That one I remember because at that point in time nationally, actually internationally, he's talking about this garment and it wasn't that the Shroud that wrapped Jesus when he was entombed, then it was discovered in the 1300s.

And so tiny samples of it were sent off and we were in the basement of some building here.

My memory is fading.

With the sample.

With the sample and U of A scientist, this is one of the, if it might still be world renowned dating laboratories.

And we shot an interview and the process and they were going to try to date the fabric itself and you'll see.

Alright, we'll see now in fact.

John, good to see you.

Thanks for coming by again.

Congrats on the project you got through.

It was a lot of work, a lot of detail, but well worth it.

And here's that story now that we present digitized about the Shroud of Turin from many years ago.

It's known as the Shroud of Turin or the Holy Shroud.

And according to some Christians, it is the image of Jesus of Nazareth miraculously preserved on the linen which wrapped his body following his crucifixion.

The Shroud of Turin actually shows the imprint of a man on a linen cloth.

And on the evaluation of this man, we can identify multiple areas of bleeding, in particular the wrist area, the foot, a large wound in his chest and a considerable amount of bleeding in his scalp and forehead.

According to Dr.

Broecker, these wounds would have proven fatal to the individual and are consistent with crucifixions.

The Shroud we are talking about appears in Léry, France about 1354.

To help settle the question of the age of the Shroud, it will be radiocarbon dated.

Today scientists at the University of Arizona briefed reporters on the procedures they will use as one of the three institutions in the world working on the project.

The other two are at England's Oxford University and Zurich's Federal Polytechnic.

I've had a few questions about how the carbon-14 dating process works.

Our atmosphere, which is made up mostly of nitrogen, is being continuously bombarded by cosmic rays.

These cosmic rays interact with the nitrogen and produce carbon-14 in the atmosphere.

Every living organism takes in this carbon-14 and stores it.

When it dies, the carbon-14 begins to decay.

Half of the atoms disappear in 6,000 years.

And this half-life can be measured by radiocarbon dating.

So by looking at the carbon-14 content in a piece of cloth and looking at the carbon-14 content in a new piece of cloth, we can tell how old it was.

Before the conference began, Dr.

Paul Damon spoke with me about some linen from 2500 B.C.

that he's been testing using the University of Arizona's Tandem Accelerator Mass Spectrometer, or TAMs.

The process to prepare and date samples using this technology is scientifically demanding.

See, the shroud has pollen on it.

After it's cleaned, the material is burned, and the carbon contained in the sample is turned into carbon dioxide gas.

This gas is then reintroduced into graphite to be used as a target for the radiocarbon dating.

The loose graphite is then packed into small metal containers.

Each sample of the shroud, for example, should make about 15 targets for testing.

These targets are loaded onto a target wheel and placed in the machine.

Here a beam of cesium is directed at the target and releases charged carbon atoms into the accelerator.

The carbon-14 atoms are separated from others by powerful magnets and directed at this gold-plated receiver which counts them.

Comparing this information with known standards gives scientists the approximate age of the item being studied.

And this technology may help prove the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.

So if we can get past the medieval period, the 13th century period, and get us back into the, let's say, first hundred years, we would then have eliminated this possibility of a painting or a forgery of medieval times.

Thank you for joining us on our premiere episode of season 45 for Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, we'll see you again next week.