20 Commands - BLACK SITE #2

[BLACK SITE #2 commands from Chloe Bass, Brooklyn-based performance artist. b. 1984 New York, NY]

Think about your body. Make it smaller. Smaller again. Make it still smaller.

Take yourself out of yourself.

Watch the person to your right.

Find a corner. Fit in.

Become invisible.

Hold your breath for 30 seconds. Count.

Drop to your knees.

Overhear a conversation.

Shut off the voice in your head.

Blend in.

Apologize.

Confess.

Pray.

Find a home.

Attack.

Accept attack.

Follow the rules.

Stop making exceptions.

Get in line.

Forget your name.

BLACK SITE #2 - OLD POLICE STATION - DEPTFORD X

A Window Into C.I.A.’s Embrace of Secret Jails | Published: August 12, 2009

WASHINGTON — In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists.



Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money — whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment.

... With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells.

... The cells were constructed with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften the impact of being slammed into the wall.

Afghans Detail Detention in ‘Black Jail’ at U.S. Base | Published: November 28, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/world/asia/29bagram.html

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: November 28, 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day

BLACK SITE #2

2 microphones hang from ceiling, output audio into walls and mattress, with bucket nearby.

MC Battles

War on Terror

The installation references both the format of competitive MCing and techniques deployed against 'enemy combatants' in the War on Terror, in order to investigate the overlap of battle and play at the scale of individual bodies.

BLACK SITE #2

"BLACK SITE #2"

Inspired by the CIA's documented use of rap music as an element of sleep depravation torture, BLACK SITE #2 consists of a multi-media installation that hybridizes ad hoc detention with ad hoc performance. Two microphones are fed into sound exciters and surface transducers that turn wall and furniture elements into speakers. Visitors are invited to use the microphones to engage in a competition, a game, or any form of performance. Using components often deployed in video game production of 'virtual' experience, multiple levels of transduction create a range of output from audio to tactile effects. The installation references both the format of competitive MCing and techniques deployed against 'enemy combatants' in the War on Terror, in order to investigate the overlap of battle and play at the scale of individual bodies. This involves, of course, a play on the word black - which here references both the signification of Black identity invoked by rap music and the CIA terminology for a specific network of facilities. This hybridization of space for cultural production and militarized detention questions the role of language and performance in the interplay between normative civil society and military operations and technology.

The BLACK SITE SERIES project

The BLACK SITE SERIES project is both an architectural research endeavor and a series of full-scale prototypes focused on sound, surveillance, displacement and the body. Based upon public-record evidence gathered in "War on Terror" depositions and trials, the project begins with an interpretation of CIA rendition cells at one-to-one scale. Hence the title: the BLACK SITE SERIES. The project involves many levels of play on the word black - referencing both the signification of Black identity, as well as the CIA terminology for a specific network of facilities. Ultimately, the project deploys architecture to investigate the role of language and performance in the interplay between normative civil society and military operations and technology.

I have begun developing the BLACK SITE SERIES this summer as two gallery installations and recently been awarded a New York State Council of the Arts Independent Project grant for further research, prototyoping and installations. The first BLACK SITE #1, built in Los Angeles at SUPERFRONT LA, emphasized the specifics of placement and geographic alignment. The second installation, BLACK SITE #2, inspired by the CIA's documented use of rap music as an element of sleep deprivation torture, consists of a multi-media installation that hybridizes ad hoc detention with ad hoc performance. Two microphones are fed into sound exciters and surface transducers that turn wall and furniture elements into speakers. That prototype has been commissioned for installation in a curated exhibit at the Old Police Station gallery for the Deptford X festival in London this September.

BLACK SITE #1 - Los Angeles

" – Would anyone like to have a little look down into the secret of how ideals are fabricated on this earth? Who has enough pluck? . . . Come on! Here we have a clear glimpse into this dark workshop." -Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

Elements of a C.I.A. interrogation facility are constructed at one-to-one scale. Referencing secret sites of U.S. military detention, the work incorporates testimony of deposition statements from detainees held in the “War on Terror”. The work reproduces the multi-sensory experience of the facility typology analyzed, including multimedia elements such as white noise and rap music, as based upon evidence gathered of actual C.I.A. detainment practices.