07.07.10 No Turning Back: dancing into the deinduatrial sublime |
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Turns out this drafty old fuselage is even more dramatically lit at sundown. I think I’m gunna try and do weekly trips out to the yard (nine miles away)—always at the extreme ends of the day—to throw my body around for the camera. I'm short on hard drive space so I’ll pull out the finest moments then delete the long takes. Eventually I’ll have enough to compile into a full-length video of pulsing, gyrating madness. Here are the rules I’ve set to give the project some structure: 1. One vantage per session, so one "set" or shooting location. I'm hoping to catch at least one monsoon thunderstorm but obviously no promises. If someone out there can throw down for a new drive—I'd prefer not to delete footage. |
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07.06.10 The Boneyard (AM) |
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Locate this piece opposite the original, a PM shoot. Besides this difference and obviously no Neil, the camcorder's audio has been replaced with a single binaural recording made on site. That intermittent roar is coming from nearby Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Daily jet engine tests remind us that the military is still second to none when it comes to burning huge amounts of highly refined aviation fuel. We’re running out of oil—quick, burn it faster! |
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07.02.10 No Turning Back (warmup) |
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This piece is a screen test version of a full-length dance video I’m doing for Gui Boratto’s pleasure heavy No Turning Back. This far into the project the title should be considered an affirmation. Longtime readers may remember these 30-second adverts from almost two years ago featuring Gui’s Beautiful Life. The Boneyard has become my industrial ruin away from home and I’ll be shooting there periodically all summer: waking at sunrise to dance inside bombed-out aircraft. Why make a dance video? Consider this one in the same vein as Brownlands Fitness: passionate physicality in ruined space. |
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06.25.10 At Home After the Apocalypse |
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Neil is the unofficial keeper of the boneyard: theses are a few of his personal effects. He’s been "enfacinated" (enthralled/fascinated) by post-apocalypticism for some time now and has surrounded himself with home furnishings made of aircraft fragments and bizarre cultish objects. He wakes each morning into a disordered landscape of enormous metallic corpses strewn about a parched slab of earth. Coyotes trot along perimeter fencing and tank-killing jet aircraft pass low overhead. It’s scorching hot an hour after sunrise, but with copious amounts of water and a Peruvian straw hat, Neil thrives. Perhaps more than anyone, he knows the beauty and spiritual value of this otherworldly place. “People come here to pray,” he said to me at the end of a recent visit. His words confirmed my suspicion that the yard has not only become a node of creative production, but a place for quiet contemplation (periodically interrupted by ear-splitting noise). Wandering amongst the severed heads of cold-war era bombers and dismembered C-130s, it’s easy to imagine the end of an age where a magical black liquid, a gift from the prehistoric past, kept these awkward birds aloft. |
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06.24.10 Eighteen Tombs of Titan II |
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In the early 60s, the government built 54 underground launch silos for this country’s largest intercontinental ballistic missile: the Titan II. 18 of the silos were clustered around Davis-Monthan AFB near Tucson, AZ (where I’m currently toughing out the July heat). Almost 30 years after decommissioning, the 18 once identical sites have taken divergent trajectories. After being welded shut, dynamited and buried, a handful were sold and started new lives in the civilian sector. There’s a nursery, a home, and a Methodist church. Some are partially excavated, and a few have become almost indistinguishable from the surrounding desert terrain. 18 Tombs of Titan II will take a look at how the sites are evolving, delve into their unique histories, explore their potential as sites of pilgrimage, and pay homage to the entomed subterranean structures as well as the men and women who kept watch over the weapons for two decades. I'll be cycling to each of the 18 remote sites over the course of the summer, locating them with only hand drawn maps derived from satellite imagery. Download a print quality PDF here. (8.1 MB) |
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06.01.10 Watertower Sessions |
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infinity_1.mp3 2m 23s (ambient) Mp3 versions of recordings made in the Davis Brownlands watertower on May 24, 2010. A cropped version of the last one is the audio for The Joy of Infinity: part two vignette. As always, headphones recommended. The enormous steel cylinder, whose internal geometry is responsible for elevating and refining my voice, is effectively a musical instrument (you sit inside). I’d like to see it, and the biologically rich land it sits on, preserved for its cultural potential. I'm convinced it is more valuable now than it ever was during its stint as a receptacle. |
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05.27.10 The Joy of Infinity: part two |
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The images are stage three cutting room floor and the audio is a recently recorded water tower session: me "singing" this time instead of whistling. Clips are in chronological order. |
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05.02.10 Tailings |
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A tailing is anything leftover—the residue of a process. |
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view stage three: part three here. |
