Interzone/Detroit – To say that the Master Musicians of Jajouka are a seminal influence doesn’t really fit. Their ‘pipes’ are something akin to thread in my material and aetheric/energetic linings. I cut my trance ritual teeth with ‘Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka’ as the soundtrack. A cassette tape was ‘passed’ to me, in a rather ceremonial way, on my first visit to Chicago, 89 maybe? The cassette eventually became the baseline of sound experiments/rituals that would find me layering ‘boom box’ upon ‘boom box’, upon static blaring TVs and hand made loops to the point where the pipes were the only things left appearing even remotely human. Last night, I revisited many of the spaces/places that I’ve connected with while working with these amazing sounds. Gratitude.
Video – Bachir Attar/Master Musicians of Jajouka live at TRINOSOPHES June 9th, 2014
Thank you for your interest in the Democracy on Wheels bus!
Democracy on Wheels Project: a mobil class room, resource center and art space. Brought to you by D-REM: Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management.
Description
Invite the bus to your neighborhood to host a conversation about Emergency Management – What is it, How does it effects the city, How can we TAKE BACK and RE-INVENT Democracy at the neighborhood level.
The people of Detroit voted against Emergency Management (Public Act 4) in November 2012. In March 2013, Gov. Snyder ignored the people’s voice by passing Public Act 436, reinstating Emergency Management , with no way for the public to repeal it!!!
Under the unchecked rule of Kevyn Orr Detroit is facing…
PRIVATIZATION of WATER
SELLING OFF of ASSETS (Belle Isle, DIA artwork)
BREAKING of union contracts
TAKING of pensions
all to pay creditors and banks at the expense of the people of Detroit.
The time has come to UNITE, ORGANIZE and CREATE a new system BY THE PEOPLE and FOR THE PEOPLE.
“One has the moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” -MLKjr
Updated & Re-edited May 16, 2014 and added voice over: RUIN PORN is an art movement that focuses on the decline of cities, buildings and infrastructure, specifically capturing urban decay and VACANCY. DETROIT and other post-industrial cities around the world are popular subjects. RUIN PORN has been widely criticized for exploiting other’s economic and social hardships while fueling a post-apocalyptic vision that disregards historical and social context, a tabula rasa or ‘blank slate’.
In Detroit, this vision, these ‘blank slate glasses’ justify a lawlessness and often unrecognized inhumanity that supports not an end to corruption, but merely the transference of corruption from one set of hands to the next. With some analysis and honesty, it can become apparent that there are long-term overt and covert strategies at play here. In governance, Emergency Management being one of many examples. In development, Detroit Future City’s strategic ‘winners and losers’ is another.
The population of ‘losers’, the anticipated and engineered losses, those left behind and their outrage, anger or inability to cope, for whatever the reason, are then used to justify the creation of a high-tech private surveillance infrastructure that protects investments through numerous private policing authorities that have vast and overlapping jurisdictions and little accountability, save to their corporate guidelines.
DETROIT DEVELOPMENT/SURVEILLANCE PORN is a visual meditation/mediation on history, power, surveillance and the displacement of people that strives towards a creative commentary on and counter-expression to RUIN PORN. It strives toward documenting the ABANDONMENT and VACANCY of humanity that is interwoven in CORPORATE DOMINATION of our experience.
ORIGINAL DOCUMENTATION:
Good Afternoon Detroit and all.
This morning’s Meditation/Mediation has bleed into the afternoon. It carries forward from the weekend’s focus on resurrection and relationships. Yesterday, I took advantage of the holiday to shoot some “b-roll” for a project and do what I used to call a ‘walkabout’, a visionary moving/walking/sitting mediation through ‘Gillyville’, the area of downtown owned by Dan Gilbert.
This is an attempt at portraying the sterility of surveillance and corporate dominance of the landscape in a way that contrasts the drive-by, objectification of abandonment and vacancy that frames what has been identified as ‘ruin porn’.
For me, it’s also an expression of the heavy-handed, top-down approach to development currently, and historically, applied in Detroit. My intention was to commune with the space in a different way, from a different perspective, listen to the buildings and the angles/angels.
When I worked for Compuware in the 00s I would spend smoke breaks walking through all the alleyways, learning what was behind the structures, the ‘backside’ of the system, mapping the relationship between what is seen and what is not. So much has changed in the past decade.
Yesterday, I was able to reconnect to that aspect of my intuition, to that ‘soulful’ work that lead me to an awareness that Detroit, being built on a ‘straight’, a waterway connecting two larger bodies of water, and due to this, is an elemental (land/water) crossroads, a portal for transformation, a sacred space, a powerful node in the aetheric/energetic realm. I thank my makers for bringing me this far.
Due to the energetic qualities of this work I couldn’t sleep last night. This video emerged as a rather random and rough document of what I saw and heard. Being spontaneous and random, there are a ton of ‘mistakes’ that make me cringe, but there are others that raise hairs. I close with this poem/invocation of elemental energies from 2003.
Much Respect and Gratitude.
Promethean Night, a curse on angels
I remember watching as the city burned amazed and awaiting ever august Detroit made devils night as she did Valliants and Galaxies
Burning Prometheus rising planting apocalyptic dreams in virile minds to seek vengeance and let loose on landscapes
I now watch crass angels in suits move clean machines across the lucid Vulcan dreamscapes of once infinite possibilities broken glass and pavement cracks allow breath, oxygen to burn
I curse sterile attempts to polish and smother and command Prometheus rise again!
*This was written in my cubicle while working at Compuware, ‘Angel’s/Devil’s Night’, October 30, 2003. It was either part of the impetus for, or grew from, my involvement with the Detroit Promethean Society, which is a story for another time. ~ ed. Sept. 2012
Graphic meditations on time and domestication from 2014.
‘Death needs TIME for what it kills to grow in’ ~William S. Burroughs
The domination of both our reality (social) and reality (geography) by white men is intended to facilitate the ongoing domestication of the human animal, our selves, our families, our communities and all other life in this space. This is done for the profit and benefit of a few. ‘They’ are those who can operate globally and, for the most part, who do so in their own interest and in so doing perpetuate the domination of their world-view. Domestication is dependent on perpetuating indoctrination through education and normalization, on fostering dependence on external resources that necessitate continued participation for survival, and on maintaining conflict between people through the counter-intuitive and divisive social systems of race and class.
Our de-evolution from unMEDIAted human animals to consumer cogs in designed environments is, in part, dependent up a unification of our concept of TIME and the repression of organic or indigenous calendar systems. Our economy is based upon time being linear or ‘running in a straight line’, from the past to the future. Our biological and intuitive patterns are intentionally tuned to a human-made system and away from more organic ones. Cutting this root connection to the natural world serves as a means to normalize and regulate our minds and bodies towards patterns of consumption.
It is TIME to consider once again trusting ourselves and our instincts.
Interzone/Detroit – To say that the Master Musicians of Jajouka are a seminal influence doesn’t really fit. Their ‘pipes’ are something akin to thread in my material and aetheric/energetic linings. I cut my trance ritual teeth with ‘Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka’ as the soundtrack. A cassette tape was ‘passed’ to me, in a rather ceremonial way, on my first visit to Chicago, 89 maybe? The cassette eventually became the baseline of sound experiments/rituals that would find me layering ‘boom box’ upon ‘boom box’, upon static blaring TVs and hand made loops to the point where the pipes were the only things left appearing even remotely human. Last night, I revisited many of the spaces/places that I’ve connected with while working with these amazing sounds. Gratitude.
Updated & Re-edited May 16, 2014 and added voice over: RUIN PORN is an art movement that focuses on the decline of cities, buildings and infrastructure, specifically capturing urban decay and VACANCY. DETROIT and other post-industrial cities around the world are popular subjects. RUIN PORN has been widely criticized for exploiting other’s economic and social hardships while fueling a post-apocalyptic vision that disregards historical and social context, a tabula rasa or ‘blank slate’.
Graphic meditations on time and domestication from 2014.
