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.
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