Detail from the installation "We Break Down Ourselves", by Dragomer, Dragomer, Fahandej, and Marovich. On view as part of the Future Migrations exhibition.
One afternoon, while on assignment at the daily newspaper where I used to work, I received an invitation to visit a waste incinerator. The plant sat along a river, in the center of the town that was my “beat” at the paper. The aging facility had been there for decades, dark and solitary, pumping out transfigured refuse through a long, thin, smokestack. Local legend had it that, when the plant was first built (to replace the tax vacuum left by abandoned mill buildings), ashes fell like thick snow onto the windshields of cars. The incinerator was the nexus of a bitter political feud in the city. A group of residents were fighting to push it out of town. I’d been lured into the plant by the manager, who wanted to win me (the dutifully objective reporter) over to his side. He wanted to show me the magic of waste incineration. It was all very secret, the public wasn’t allowed inside.The receiving floor of the waste bunker was thick with a soft residue. My heels sank into it. The ceiling must have been four stories high. It was dark, save the dim lights of trucks that dumped, unceasingly, onto a conveyer belt. The sound of shattering glass rocked the space. The smell was some combination of rot and toxic shock. It’s one of those horrifying experiences that’s remained etched on my mind. What was most terrifying, to me, was the sheer girth. There was just so much trash. Continue reading “Speculative Migrations: The Future is Garbage”
Posted by Krista
on May 7, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: Beatrice Marovich, Kathy Dragomer, Krista Dragomer, Rashin Fahandej, speculative theory •
Sunday, May 6 was the second in a three part conversation led by Proteus Anthropologist-In-Residence Eben Kirksey, examining what happens when natural and cultural worlds intermingle and collide. Eben is hosting the Multispecies Salon at Proteus Gowanus this spring, a “paraethnographic field site” where anthropologists, biologists, ecoartists and bioartists come together. The Multispecies Salon is a particularly concentrated instance of what Proteus Gowanus offers by serving as a site where the common interests of multiple disciplines can be explored through exhibitions and events that focus on a single theme over the course of a year.
As Eben says of the Multispecies Salon, “Art serve(s) as a companion and catalyst practice for thinking through and against nature-culture dichotomies.” His first conversation, April 29th, was a presentation and discussion of the Multispecies Salon, entitled ‘Gleanings from a Para-Site’. Yesterday’s conversation turned on the question of finding ‘Hope In Blasted Landscapes’. Next Sunday, May 13 5pm, Eben will lead a conversation on ‘Life in the Age of Biotechnology’.
Posted by Tammy
on May 7, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: Eben Kirksey, multispecies salon, paraethnography •
Luckily not as cold as yesterday morning, although still on the brisk side. Some excellent sounds in the Vale and Midwood. Good woodpecker vocalizations and tapping, both atypical bird noise. Highlight two Canada geese flying overhead and, as is their wont, honking, very loud compared to the often subtle sounds of song birds. A rooster in the Zoo greeted the morning in its traditional farmyard or Lower East Side style. The whistles and three internal combustion vehicles evidently necessary for a bicycle race on the negative side, although the liquid rush of the actual cycles going by in a pod was strangely satisfying. No May Day pagans celebrating their ancient sexual practices with haunting song as there were on last year’s Listening Tour.
–Matthew Wills
Posted by Tammy
on April 30, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: •
Sunday morning at 6 a.m. at Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Park, I will be leading a Listening Tour for Proteus Gowanus, as part of Proteus’ year-long series of events, exhibits, and performances centered around the theme of Migration.
The birds do it, some of the butterflies and dragonflies do it, and so do the sea turtles, and the caribou, and other animals, and, of course, we do it, too. Starting out from Africa, humans settled the planet remarkably quickly, and immigration and emigration have been facts of human life ever since.
So migration is a physical process, a translation from one place to another – the word translation originally meant “moving the body” and was originally used ecclesiastically, as in the translation of a bishop, but also in reference to the bodies of saints moved from here to there, like St. Mark’s, smuggled out of Egypt to Venice.
On the Listening Tour, we will be listening to the manifestation of an awe-inspiring migration, that of the birds who have arrived in recent days and weeks from the southeastern U.S., the Caribbean, and Central and South American. They have come north to breed, and many will continue on further into the far reaches of arctic Canada. Continue reading “Thoughts Prior to the Listening Tour”
Posted by Tammy
on April 30, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: matthew wills, prospect Park •
Proteus Gowanus is pleased to announce a new public art installation located at the corner of Smith Street and Bergen Street in partnership with the NYC Department of Transportion’s Urban Art Program and the Boerum Hill Association. This is the second in a series of public art installations, performances and workshops called Battle Pass, a Proteus Gowanus initiative that will explore Revolutionary imagery over the next year. The project marks sites of the Battle of Brooklyn, the first and biggest battle of the Revolutionary War, sometimes forgotten in the very neighborhoods in which it occurred.
Battle Pass Revolution II
The installation by Sasha Chavchavadze was inspired by the “Liberty Pole,” a ship’s mast planted in the ground in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War as a symbol of protest, and by Walt Whitman’s poem about the Battle, “The Centenarian’s Story.” The installation, a 16-foot mahogany pole with directional signs “burned” with text from the Whitman poem, is topped by a weathervane referencing one that was affixed to the historical pole, drawing attention to the circular meaning of the word “revolution” and to the surrounding Battle history.
Chavchavadze is a multi-media artist whose installations explore the complexity and devastation of historical upheaval and war. Battle Pass: Revolution II draws parallels between past and present as it stimulates Brooklyn’s “memory” of this seminal moment in American history which took place in our midst.
Posted by Tammy
on March 28, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: american revolution, battle pass, liberty pole, sasha chavchavadze, walt whitman •
It’s ideal to start from a central station or one that has as many lines as possible. Your goal is to assign yourself a destination in a way that keeps it a surprise. Here are a few ways you might go about doing that. adjust, remix, & invent as you desire.
All of these techniques work best when you take the results seriously. What if your destination is a place you’ve been before? Sometimes the familiar is the most unknown. What if you’re afraid it will be a boring place? Unbore it. Let it unbore you. What if you’d rather go to the next stop on the line, or the last, or someplace you have a yen for? You can go on an ordinary excursion at any time—this is your chance to unknow.
Yes, it’s a kind of game. So play hard.
Continue reading “From the Bureau of Unknown Destinations: How to Unknow”
Posted by Tammy
on March 17, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: bureau of unknown destinations, migration, psychogeographic destinations kit, sal randolph •
Why Unknow?
All around us is a mysterious landscape which occupies the same spatial dimensions as the one we are intimately familiar with. The unknown is everywhere intertwined with the known; to see it, we only need break our own habits. Take a wrong turning one day. Navigate by mismatched maps. Get on a train without knowing where you’ll end up.
Psychogeography is the art of moving through space according to feelings and effects rather than ordinary purposes. Like all the experimental arts, it seeks to break routine ways of being, hoping for the freshness of new experience. Psychogeography has a history that begins in Paris with the poet Baudelaire’s favorite figure, the “flaneur” or drifter—one who spends the day walking through the city with no other purpose than to experience its ambiances. Later, Guy Debord and his companions in the Lettrist and Situationist movements briefly held the dream that “the new type of beauty can only be a beauty of situations.” Only an art of creating “situations,” they thought, had the potential to change how people lived and felt. The situations they loved involved cities, going from one place to another, chance encounters.
Here’s Debord: “Of all the affairs we participate in, with or without interest, the groping quest for a new way of life is the only thing that remains really exciting. Aesthetic and other disciplines have proved glaringly inadequate in this regard and merit the greatest indifference. We should therefore delineate some provisional terrains of observation, including the observation of certain processes of chance and predictability in the streets…. Psychogeography sets for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographical can be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.”
Continue reading “An Excerpt: Psychogeographic Destination Kit”
Posted by Tammy
on March 17, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: bureau of unknown destination, psychogeographic destination kit, sal randolph •
The Bureau of Unknown Destinations’ “Psychogeographic Destination Kits” are ready at last. Having given away over a hundred rail trips to the adventurous, The Bureau now expands operations by giving travelers the means to unknow their own destinations. Everyone is invited to download a kit and test it out.
The Psychogeographic Destination Kit is offered as a provocation to potential voyagers, an invitation to take a day, get on a train, and go someplace you know nothing about. The kit offers a variety of methods of unknowing, some thoughts about why unknow, and a handy foldable mini-notebook to use in recording your experience. For those departing from the Bureau’s base in New York, there’s a pre-printed set of destination cards to play with. For others, a blank set to fill in and work from.
Unknowing your destination is an art form that anyone can practice. You are the author, the architect, the composer of your experience.
The kit is made available in the form of a downloadable pdf and creative commons licensed. Anyone using the kit is invited to copy, share, and adapt it freely, and to send their findings back to the Bureau to contribute to the ongoing documentation of the project.
Download at http://unknowndestinations.org
– Sal Randolph, Artist-In-Residence
Posted by Tammy
on March 17, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: bureau of unknown destination, migration, psychogeographic destination kit, psychogeography, sal randolph •
On Tuesday evening, Proteus Gowanus featured three filmmakers in our screening, “The Wayfarers: Films on Solitary Migration“, part of the ongoing series based on Proteus’ year-long theme of Migration. All three films documented the diverse American landscape in their own way while revealing the directors’ intentions for embarking on their trips.
Kevin Gallagher’s piece about his hike through the Appalachian Trail evoked the idyllic, and at times hypnotic, feeling of traveling through the natural world on foot. While more of a structural film than the others, Kevin’s piece achieved a lot without saying much.
Bill Brown journeyed north from the Carolinas to present “The Other Side” on 16mm film, which documented his trip along the U.S. border with Mexico. Vanessa Renwick’s film “Crowdog” recounted a barefoot hitchhike she took around the States, at one point stopping to visit a Native American reservation in North Dakota. Both films pondered what means to be an outsider looking in on such distinct regions. Both filmmakers meditated on their experiences through narration, and both visited American landscapes where borders are part of an intense political and cultural environment.
During the post-screening discussion, “The Other Side” sparked a conversation about first-person cinema with a political viewpoint, and whether the filmmaker has a responsibility to be conscious of his or her own presence. In the end, Bill’s film had many layers of migratory imagery, including borderlines, meandering rivers, tracker trailers,and ultimately illegal immigrants. There was a lot to dissect, but surely not enough time to do it in one discussion.
Proteus would like to thank the filmmakers for submitting their work, and Bill Brown for appearing in person with his film.
The next screening in the series will be on Tuesday, April 3rd.
Posted by Tammy
on March 12, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: America, film, journeys, Kevin Gallagher, migration, Sean Hanley, Vanessa Renwick •
Since January 12, the Bureau of Unknown Destinations has offered temporary displacements to members of the public seeking to experiment with their migratory impulses, as part of our yearlong Migration theme. We are now delighted to announce that the Bureau has given away its 100th free round-trip ticket for a daylong train adventure. You may wish to visit the Bureau’s offices to see the results of some of these trips, as Participants were also given a notebook and a small, somewhat absurd, task to complete during their journeys.
Is it all over then? Not at all! The Bureau is currently developing the Psychogeographic Destination Kit to guide adventurers wishing to develop their own journeys into the unknown. The kits will be ready soon and will be made freely available to one and all. The kits will be ready soon and will be made freely available to one and all.
The Bureau of Unknown Destinations
The Bureau’s offices are open for viewing during Proteus’ hours and will be manned by the station master, Sal Randolph, on most Saturday’s from 1-5 and irregularly during the week. The Bureau of Unknown Destinations is part of a three month artist’s residency by Sal at Proteus Gowanus, extending through mid-April.
Posted by Tammy
on February 20, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: bureau of unknown destinations, sal randolph •
