Tuesday, September 20, 2011
presenting "global/local: black sites and other research" at Studio X
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE
Mitch McEwen - announcement -
seeking: venue partners, performance artists, transportation sponsors
Please forward to performance artists who may be interested to engage the programming of a space designed to operate outside of lawful control, yet highly formal and geared toward gathering information.
BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE
How does architecture engage today's most complex ethical dilemmas in America - the politics of information, the normalization of long-term mechanized war, the abstractness of foreign bodies, the intersection of legal rights and spatial territory? The BLACK SITE project investigates these ethical questions within terms germane to contemporary architecture - invoking strategies shared with contemporary military practice, including: pop-up sites, temporary construction, programmatic fluidity, embedded media, and low-cost materials.
More than two years after President Obama declared the end to the practice of secret CIA holding cells, known as "black sites," the practices of rendition and interrogation remain as secret and nebulous as ever. Indeed, as of this summer, the CIA appears to be operating a network of black sites in Mogadishu, Somalia, despite President Obama's declaration and in continuous defiance of the Writ of Habeas Corpus and the Geneva Conventions.
The culmination of a trilogy of installations, BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE consists of an elegant black tie event produced within a one-to-one scale spatial reenactment of a CIA black site. The space of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE selectively reproduces architectural technologies of actual black site facilities, including multi-media elements that filter and emit white noise, rap and other music, as based upon reporting of C.I.A. detainment practices. Microphones are fed into sound exciters and surface transducers that turn wall and furniture elements into speakers. 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.
Visitors will meet at a pre-designated location to be escorted to (and from) the undisclosed secret site of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE. The location of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE will be either disguised within a known institution or sited outside of traditional exhibition venues. One to three BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE events will take place between the dates of Thursday, November 3, 2011 and Monday, November 21, 2011. The location will be indistinguishable to visitors and announced only following the dismantling of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE.
To get involved or register as a visitor, please email blacksite@thaconglomerate.com
BLACK SITE #2, installation photo, Old Police Station gallery, 2010, London, UK
BLACK SITE #2, installation detail, Old Police Station gallery, 2010, London, UK
BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE is enabled by generous funding from the New York State Council on the Arts
seeking: venue partners, performance artists, transportation sponsors
Please forward to performance artists who may be interested to engage the programming of a space designed to operate outside of lawful control, yet highly formal and geared toward gathering information.
BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE
How does architecture engage today's most complex ethical dilemmas in America - the politics of information, the normalization of long-term mechanized war, the abstractness of foreign bodies, the intersection of legal rights and spatial territory? The BLACK SITE project investigates these ethical questions within terms germane to contemporary architecture - invoking strategies shared with contemporary military practice, including: pop-up sites, temporary construction, programmatic fluidity, embedded media, and low-cost materials.
More than two years after President Obama declared the end to the practice of secret CIA holding cells, known as "black sites," the practices of rendition and interrogation remain as secret and nebulous as ever. Indeed, as of this summer, the CIA appears to be operating a network of black sites in Mogadishu, Somalia, despite President Obama's declaration and in continuous defiance of the Writ of Habeas Corpus and the Geneva Conventions.
The culmination of a trilogy of installations, BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE consists of an elegant black tie event produced within a one-to-one scale spatial reenactment of a CIA black site. The space of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE selectively reproduces architectural technologies of actual black site facilities, including multi-media elements that filter and emit white noise, rap and other music, as based upon reporting of C.I.A. detainment practices. Microphones are fed into sound exciters and surface transducers that turn wall and furniture elements into speakers. 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.
Visitors will meet at a pre-designated location to be escorted to (and from) the undisclosed secret site of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE. The location of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE will be either disguised within a known institution or sited outside of traditional exhibition venues. One to three BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE events will take place between the dates of Thursday, November 3, 2011 and Monday, November 21, 2011. The location will be indistinguishable to visitors and announced only following the dismantling of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE.
To get involved or register as a visitor, please email blacksite@thaconglomerate.com
BLACK SITE #2, installation photo, Old Police Station gallery, 2010, London, UK
BLACK SITE #2, installation detail, Old Police Station gallery, 2010, London, UK
BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE is enabled by generous funding from the New York State Council on the Arts
About Mitch McEwen
Mitch McEwen, Principal of A. Conglomerate, is a recipient of the The New York State Council on the Arts 2010 Independent Projects awards for Architecture, Planning and Design. The Akademie Schloss Solitude has granted her a residency fellowship in architecture for 2012-2013. McEwen's work evolves from concepts and provocations within a social field. In her work performance often becomes an act of architectural interpretation. She is profiled in the September 2011 issue of ARTnews. Her architectural work has been published in Architectural Record and the New York Times, and her writing in African-American studies has been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (IRAAS, Columbia University, 2007, 2009). Since founding SUPERFRONT in January 2008, she has curated more than fifteen exhibits and published 4 exhibition catalogues. In 2006, she was invited to join the adjunct faculty of Columbia GSAPP as Adjunct Assistant Professor to create a new cross-disciplinary course for urban planners and urban designers. She holds an M.Arch from Columbia GSAPP and A.B. from Harvard.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia, excerpts from Jeremy Scahill
This article appeared in the August 1-8, 2011 edition of The Nation. Below are excerpts that focus on the more architectural information, including site and egress.
Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access....
According to former detainees, the underground prison, which is staffed by Somali guards, consists of a long corridor lined with filthy small cells infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes. One said that when he arrived in February, he saw two white men wearing military boots, combat trousers, gray tucked-in shirts and black sunglasses. The former prisoners described the cells as windowless and the air thick, moist and disgusting....
A Somali who was arrested in Mogadishu and taken to the prison told The Nation that he was held in a windowless underground cell. Among the prisoners he met during his time there was a man who held a Western passport (he declined to identify the man’s nationality). Some of the prisoners told him they were picked up in Nairobi and rendered on small aircraft to Mogadishu, where they were handed over to Somali intelligence agents....
According to the former fellow prisoner, Hassan told him that his captors took him to Wilson Airport: “‘They put a bag on my head, Guantánamo style. They tied my hands behind my back and put me on a plane. In the early hours we landed in Mogadishu. The way I realized I was in Mogadishu was because of the smell of the sea—the runway is just next to the seashore....
Throughout the areas AMISOM has retaken is a honeycomb of underground tunnels once used by Shabab fighters to move from building to building. By some accounts, the tunnels stretch continuously for miles. Leftover food, blankets and ammo cartridges lay scattered near “pop-up” positions once used by Shabab snipers and guarded by sandbags—all that remain of guerrilla warfare positions.
Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access....
According to former detainees, the underground prison, which is staffed by Somali guards, consists of a long corridor lined with filthy small cells infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes. One said that when he arrived in February, he saw two white men wearing military boots, combat trousers, gray tucked-in shirts and black sunglasses. The former prisoners described the cells as windowless and the air thick, moist and disgusting....
A Somali who was arrested in Mogadishu and taken to the prison told The Nation that he was held in a windowless underground cell. Among the prisoners he met during his time there was a man who held a Western passport (he declined to identify the man’s nationality). Some of the prisoners told him they were picked up in Nairobi and rendered on small aircraft to Mogadishu, where they were handed over to Somali intelligence agents....
According to the former fellow prisoner, Hassan told him that his captors took him to Wilson Airport: “‘They put a bag on my head, Guantánamo style. They tied my hands behind my back and put me on a plane. In the early hours we landed in Mogadishu. The way I realized I was in Mogadishu was because of the smell of the sea—the runway is just next to the seashore....
Throughout the areas AMISOM has retaken is a honeycomb of underground tunnels once used by Shabab fighters to move from building to building. By some accounts, the tunnels stretch continuously for miles. Leftover food, blankets and ammo cartridges lay scattered near “pop-up” positions once used by Shabab snipers and guarded by sandbags—all that remain of guerrilla warfare positions.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Rachel Maddow on black sites
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
New revelations on CIA Black Sites
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/am-i-a-torturer/
Wired.com:: You’re maybe the only CIA officer to publicly describe a “black site” prison, your Hotel California. What was it like to be inside a place completely off the books from any legal accountability? Did it make you feel like you could act with impunity? How did you restrain yourself?
Carle: No, I never, never felt like I could or should act with impunity. No one I know felt that way. We all felt we were involved in an extraordinary, sensitive operation that required very careful behavior. What was acceptable was often unclear, despite the formal guidance that eventually was developed.
“How did I restrain myself” implies perhaps that I was inclined to act in unrestrained ways. I never, ever was; nor were, in my experience, my colleagues. From literally the first second I was briefed on the operation, I was acutely aware that I would have to weigh every step I took, and decide what was morally, legally acceptable. There was never the slightest thought that I or anyone could act with impunity. We were acting clandestinely; but never beyond obligations to act correctly and honorably. The dilemma comes in identifying where those lines are, in a situation in which much was murky.
Wired.com:: You’re maybe the only CIA officer to publicly describe a “black site” prison, your Hotel California. What was it like to be inside a place completely off the books from any legal accountability? Did it make you feel like you could act with impunity? How did you restrain yourself?
Carle: No, I never, never felt like I could or should act with impunity. No one I know felt that way. We all felt we were involved in an extraordinary, sensitive operation that required very careful behavior. What was acceptable was often unclear, despite the formal guidance that eventually was developed.
“How did I restrain myself” implies perhaps that I was inclined to act in unrestrained ways. I never, ever was; nor were, in my experience, my colleagues. From literally the first second I was briefed on the operation, I was acutely aware that I would have to weigh every step I took, and decide what was morally, legally acceptable. There was never the slightest thought that I or anyone could act with impunity. We were acting clandestinely; but never beyond obligations to act correctly and honorably. The dilemma comes in identifying where those lines are, in a situation in which much was murky.
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