Spring 2025 27 STUDENT CULTURE urated steam at seven pounds per square inch and roughly 360 degrees Fahrenheit from the Energy Center, at the corner of 35th Street and Jefferson Way, to the far reaches of campus. Telecommunications cables wend along walls of made up in part of hand-poured concrete bricks, and massive nodes conveying 22,000 volts of electricity jut out from the wall in places. Unofficially, the tunnels have been the subject of student fascination for generations. So when Fidler reached out to Walton about touring the Energy Center and adjacent tunnels for art inspiration, Walton had an idea: What if her students designed a mural to paint inside the tunnels? Fidler’s class offers an introduction to the basic principles of art: line, color, texture, value. Each term, she designs a project in which students create a site-specific pattern for, or inspired by, locations across the university — previous projects have included wallpaper in the Memorial Union and tiles for the Dixon pool.“I’m hoping that they just kind of cemented that they’re part of this place,”Walton says.“Apiece of them will always be here.” Fidler structured the project as a competition; the students who designed the winning proposals would go on to spend the final weeks of the spring term painting the concrete interior of the tunnels’ entrance next to the Energy Center. (Fidler plans to repeat the contest in her class this spring.) “The first thing I said to my group was, ‘I kind of want to win it,’” says Dylan Altemus, the sophomore whose sketch, alongside Vafi’s, did in fact prevail. They spent hours at a time — including spooky late nights — bringing their mural to life. “It’s a cool secret,”Vafi says,“that there’s a big piece of our art underground.” In doing so, they were also in dialogue with previous generations of students who had inscribed themselves, implicitly or explicitly, into the university’s foundations. In 1992, Derek Schott, then a member of OSU’s campus security, logged into the Unix mainframe in the basement of the old computer science building and posted on a Usenet forum: “Here at Oregon State University we used to have a problem with people entering the steam tunnels under the campus,” he wrote. “Recently there is evidence that people might once again be entering them. … My question is, does anyone have any experience with this? Do these tunnels exist at most universities, and if so, what goes on down there?” He followed up a few days later, after exploring the tunnels with some peers in campus security and the state police. “Didn’t find any bodies, but it was quite interesting,” he wrote. “I’m not kidding: We were so hot we thought we were going to die,” Schott recalls now. “When you go down there with other people, you get creeped out,” he continues.“We were all jabbing at each other, trying to scare each other.” During the handful of expeditions he undertook, Schott found anti-Vietnam War protest graffiti dating back to the 1970s, and inverted pentagrams sketched onto the walls. From a certain perspective, telling and retelling scary stories about the tunnels continued ↓ Warning signs about high voltage or, in this case, confined spaces, are regular sights. “IT’S A COOL SECRET THAT THERE’S A BIG PIECE OF OUR ART UNDERGROUND.”
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