SF Gravelator 91L

As mentioned here from time to time, I represent one third of the experimental collective DEMILIT. We are a group taking walks, recording sounds, and making connections between militarized spaces and the everyday landscape. Last year we were commissioned by Deutchlandradio Kultur to produce a radio piece on their "Newcomer Werkstatt" program, which aired in Berlin at midnight, June 24, 2011.

As DEMILIT likes to do when presented with an opportunity, we take a walk. With a plethora of former military landscapes to explore here in the Bay Area, we set our sights on Angel Island. The island has a long history as a militarized island, beginning as an Army Post in the Civil War and culminating as a strategic link in a necklace of missile defense silos around the Bay Area in the 1960s. Angel is also notoriously known as an immigrant detention and quarantine island. [More history] What DEMILIT sought to accomplish on our walk, and in the ensuing soundscape presented below, was a means of measuring the spaces embedded in the island, the spaces which cannot be seen but which can be heard.

SF-91L is the name of the abandoned Nike Missile station on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay where we recorded the sounds for this piece. Gravelator refers to the simultaneous process of building up and eroding away the island. We displaced the island's own material to construct a second island, an imaginary island, which is encapsulated in the sound.

In a related fashion, the military severed the island’s crown in order to install the radar system for the missiles. The missiles were made obsolete not long after it was finished and was decommissioned. Decades later, the Gravelator is a means of awakening the sequestered spaces of the silo. Listen:

I call it a "chronoscape" -- between landscape and soundscape, a work of sound both on the geographic scale and on the time scale.  Though the piece has a finite boundary in time, it is intended as an aural window onto an oceanic sonic process.  In a similar fashion the work appears to have a finite geographic boundary; however, an island is not a separate piece of land but a promontory of land which happens to rise above the water level.  There is a continuity in both time and geography which reflects the underlying and pervasive process of militarization which DEMILIT seeks to expose in our work.
More from DEMILIT's tumblr feed: http://demilit.tumblr.com/SFG

Traces of a Pre-Military Landscape

A definite sonic quality to this 1932 aerial view of San Francisco Bay.  Found via.

Much has been made of exploring post-military landscapes, but what is to be said of the pre-military landscape?

For instance, survey the busy San Francisco Bay in the photo above, just a handful of years before the military began its massive transformation of the watery edge.  It is worth observing how well this landscape lent itself to being transformed by the military.  Alameda Airport, tucked away in the bottom left, was positioned adjacent to the Oakland shipping channel. Both sides of the mouth of this channel would become intensely militarized leading up to WWII.  In the middle of the Bay sits Yerba Buena Island before it and the unborn Treasure Island became militarized.

These peripheral spaces--the thickened crust at the city's edge--were fertile territories for projecting the city's and by extension, the nation's power.  The gridded financial district and the commercial vitality of Market Street depended on these militarized edges for protection and free trade.  Thus the landscape of the bay played a crucial role in projecting American power into the Pacific.

So a curious thing happens to the landscape then when that fountainhead of power withdraws its might.  There is a power vacuum.  An almost infinite array of possibilities arise, then, when the military departs suddenly, by act of congress or explosion of volcano.

This is a roundabout way of announcing my talk "The Post-Military Landscape Future" to be given at Architecture for Humanity's 848 Folsom St. office, at lunchtime on September 7th.  I will be speaking about my tour of US military bases around the world in 2009, focusing on bases closed and bases in transition.  The former military bases of the Bay Area formed a good part of my inspiration for setting out on this traveling fellowship.  AFH and the Open Architecture Network are gearing up to announce a competition on finding strategies for reclaiming military bases: [un]restricted access.  This is an unprecedented opportunity to collect knowledge and project possible futures for military landscapes around the world.

The second local event to announce is that DEMILIT will be leading a walk at the Headlands Center for the Arts on September 25th as a part of the program "Desire Trails".  We will be scraping sounds from the former Nike Missile site, now a Marine Mammal Center, across the lagoon from the old Army barracks in which the Headlands Center for Arts is sited.  Stay tuned to DEMILIT for more details on the event.

Concluding here, it is useful--necessary, even--to interpret the post-military landscape for clues to its pre-military nature.  For we cannot predict exactly how our contemporary landscape will shift due to future militarization.  We can, however, extrapolate from current and past transformations of space what it is that makes up a military landscape.  It is the task of DEMILIT and others to document that change.  The medium of sound, examined and projected here as part of the architectural practice called Soundscrapers, enables but one of many media which may expose these traces of militarization.

Dispatches from the Fortress of Eden

Park Avenue, Adobe Systems Inc., via Google Streetview

It's another sunny day in downtown San Jose, just like everyday is on Google Streetview.  The fog of San Francisco never seems to get close.  It's just an average day like this that two of DEMILIT's members, myself and Bryan Finoki, decide to have a look around.

We're getting ready for an installation at the SJ01 San Jose Biennale next month.  Our group (also including Javier Arbona) is a loose one based upon a collective gravitation toward military landscapes.  Each of us will define differently what a 'military landscape' is, what our methods for exploring them are, and what sorts of projects we envision out of them.  But the fact of the matter is we're hooked on 'em, and they don't seem to be going away any time soon.

Details will follow on what DEMILIT is up to, who is coming to speak, and the installations that we are preparing for SJ01  One thing we'd like to get people involved with is a guided tour of the militarization of downtown San Jose.  So Bryan and I made an adventure out of our first practice run.

It was our first visit as pedestrians in downtown San Jose.  We had little idea what, if anything, we would find.  I anticipated large stretches of boring, smooth, generic downtown urban space.  We definitely saw some of that.  In these sorts of mundane places, however, the clues for how the urban environment is shaped by invisible sources of power are best detected.  What is it that makes us feel safe in a city?  Is this security based on anything real, or do we depend upon invisible factors and codes that buttress our corporate-consumer culture?

San Jose City Hall, Richard Meier, completed in 2005

Bryan and I spotted the City Hall and decided to linger in the large plaza.  Bollards of many typologies (flagpoles, rocks, fountains, and our favorite--poles spouting mist (wanna-be San Francisco fog?) ) buffer the plaza from Santa Clara St.  The space definitely has some military-urbanist planning codes informing the proportions, the standoff distances, etc.  I'll leave that for a future post to delve into.

We also walked the perimeter of Adobe's corporate park, and we discussed some of its features.  Lacking the glorious allusions to the elegant geometries of traditional fortresses (epaulette, ravelin, Priest's Cap, bastions with ciruclar flanks, etc), we are left with the viewing cones of surveillance cameras and blank walls of ground-floor mechanical rooms to understand its fortress nature.  Listen:

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Bryan and I then traversed the innocuous San Jose landscape to an office tower at 225 W. Santa Clara Ave.  At an elusive Suite 1600, one can find the offices of Jeppesen, a Boeing subsidiary which allegedly assisted with the trip planning of CIA rendition flights.  I'll leave it to Bryan to fill in details at another time.  For now, we just want to knock on their door.  You know, we're wondering if they are hiring.  Listen:

That's it for now.  There is a lot more work to be done in order to understand the place of San Jose in the larger Bay Area fortification.  We'll also be looking at the former blimp hangars at Moffett Field and the  Mission Santa Clara de Asís as components of this military landscape.  San Jose, from fruit orchards to pyramids of silicon, is not as obvious as the military landscapes of Alameda, Richmond, and the Presidio, but it is our task to demonstrate how it is a military landscape and through this task, we may come to learn more about our own assumptions and ways of looking at these landscapes.

The Accidental Archive

The #demilit workshop was a great success last week. Bryan, Javier and I led a small group of people into the vast hinterland of military space. The discussion ranged from buildings in former Yugoslavia as evidence in war crimes to walking tours to examine the remnants of nuclear militarization. It was an intense 90 minutes that could easily have spun off ten more workshops. We are excited about the future possibilities between the three of us and with those that we met in the workshops.

There is a curious tangent to this effort of producing an archive of military space that I'd like to share, before I delve into the content and future directions of the workshop in a later post. I am fascinated with ways of archiving military landscapes which could produce a documentation of a non-military landscape. Put another way, how does a peripheral vision, or if we think in audio terms, the background noise, code the landscape in ways we might otherwise not detect? The military has its own means of extracting signals from noise, which began with sound mirrors and continues today with a myriad of listening ears, satellites, etc etc. As citizens, equipped with microphones, recorders, and free means of disseminating the content of an archive via archive.org or freesound.org, how might we also decode signals from the 'noise'? Without knowing what to look for, could we actually stumble upon useful archives and linkages of soundscapes?

I owe these thoughts to one of the participants in the workshop, Nicholas Kaufmann, who pointed us toward the documentary The Tailenders. This film "examines a missionary organization’s use of ultra-low-tech audio devices to evangelize indigenous communities facing crises caused by global economic forces." These missionaries were recording stories from the Bible in other languages, which had an interesting by-product of recording the background environment in which these indigenous communities lived.  So, you could take the recordings and listen to how the language of the Bible stories translates, or you could forget about the language and just decode or 'foreground' the background sound content, what R. Murray Schafer might refer to as the 'soundmark' of a place.  Nicholas brought it up because he was interested in how to subvert the archive or at least bring awareness to how archival projects can archive other things inadvertently.  It is the accidental archive, not dissimilar from the military's accidental archiving of native birds which I mentioned in a previous post here on Soundscrapers.

Swallowed Buildings

Pulling more out from my sound archives. In September 2009, I was in Vicenza, Italy, studying the US Army base there. I was able to gain access to the base via some contacts I made through the Corps of Engineers, but I also walked the edges of the base, just because you always find interesting things in these border spaces. Among my findings, some private housing which used to be part of the Italian street. Since the property abuts the base, the military was able to lease out the building and expand into it in order to fulfill their own housing needs.




But imagine living on this street, visiting your neighbors from time to time, and then everyone is served a move-out notice by the owner. After a few months, the apartment is vacated, the barbed wire goes up and the building is no longer part of your street. Its own boundary with the base is ruptured and the apartment is militarized. It's as though the military swallows buildings.

I took a moment to record my thoughts. Listen:

They took my fork

This Friday I am leading a workshop titled "Decoding Military Landscapes" with Javier Arbona and Bryan Finoki. The aim of this workshop is to find a means for bringing awareness of invisible militarizations of space in the cities we live in.

But what do we mean by militarization of everyday space? A simple example and one which I relentlessly documented as I traveled last year is the baggage screening machine at airports. An airport is a highly militarized space as we are all flying around in potential missiles. We are familiar with the routine of removing metals, isolating liquids, etc etc. so that our bodies may pass through into the sterilized security zone of the airport's interior.

The fact that we have become so neutralized to, and even appreciative of this routine, is bewildering. It is the contemporary 'walled city'. Is the baggage security check our only means of defense? Hardly. Part of the agenda of this workshop is to ask first how far does the military penetrate into our daily lives and then how do we document and archive this?

In this particular example, how is the spatial experience of passage through this 'wall' mediated by this security check? What is the literal experience of the check itself, and does it constitute a military appropriation of private space? It is my desire to archive how these spaces have been militarized through the recording of sound.

In this particular example, a fork which was part of a camping set that I bought at the Kathmandu outfitters in New Zealand is confiscated by security at the airport in Athens.

The recording begins with the mic setup in my bag, and you then pass to the interior of the screening machine, and then you are inspected by the security officer. As you can probably guess, it was a much-loved fork. Listen: