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.

Military Pastoral

Busy times offline here at Soundscrapers.

Found in print only, on a newsstand somewhere, is an essay and set of drawings titled "Military Pastoral" in issue 138 of Frieze magazine.  In the article I write about two military landscapes with vastly divergent post-military paths:  Gettysburg, memorialized ad infinitum, and Palmanova, finding new life in its eroding geometries.

The Entropic Timepiece of Gettysburg Memorial Park

  

Last month, Places over at Design Observer published "Soundscape: Atlantikwal" with several tracks of bunker audio extracted from my military architecture tour of 2009.

Soundscrapers is also involved in a sonic excavation of Angel Island, in collaboration with the DEMILIT crew.  Stay tuned for an announcement on that front.

The Sonic Archivist

I'm doing the folks over at the Echo Red conference a quick favor by posting some samples by the Sonic Archivist of Guam. We open with the resonances recorded in the hollows of the jet noise barrier, overlaid with an F-22 flyover. We then descend into some of the boarded-up buildings of the former air base, down into some caves (artificial or natural?) and emerge in the interior of the abandoned base. Listen:

A Shroud of Swiftlet-Space

The Ornithologist has posted his report over at Archinect.com.

What I think is most interesting in the report is the masking or camouflage of military space with artificial ecologies. By producing bird habitat, the military can prolong their presence. However, too successful of a habitat will lead to the birds' over-taking of the base, by activist protest or B.A.S.H.--Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard.

The Swiftlet is interesting because it uses echolocation to navigate in combination with eyesight. Bats also use echolocation but the sonar emitted is typically at frequencies higher than humans can hear.

The bird nests are edible, too. The industry for swiftlet bird nests is already on the rise in Malaysia. There is even a website which allows you to download Swiftlet sound for free. In this way you can "seed" your own swiftlet farm, broadcasting these bird calls to attract the birds to make their nests in your abandoned building (or military base, as it may be).

Swiftlet farming, like the US military, thrives on the production of ghost ecologies.

Red Sands Boat Trip

As seen on BLDG BLOG, my wife and I took a boat trip out to see these incredible structures leftover from WWII. The day was filled with some unexpected events, such as the lowering of a broken windmill turbine onto the boat, using an old crane arm from one of the towers. On board, in awe of these hulking towers of rusting steel, will be a couple hours of my life that I will never forget.

Here's but a small sample of the sounds recorded out there. Listen:

10: Okinawa Creepy Yaedake

I finished day 8 on top of Okinawa's second tallest mountain, or rather a hill at about 450m above sea level. My goal was a US communication station which has been partially returned to the Okinawa Prefecture. There are several satellites still in function, including the one which I describe in the podcast. After the sun sets I head down alone, darkness chasing my tail. The surrounding jungle comes alive. Listen:

2: Waikele Ammo Bunker

I spent the morning at these old Navy ammo bunkers. Listen:




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1: Panama

This is the first Soundscrapers podcast.  As I travel around the world to visit military bases and post-military spaces, I will be collecting audio in 10-20 minute sonic cross-sections.

If you download podcasts on itunes and the like, use the subscribe link to the right. Headphones recommended. Please enjoy.

a mini guide

0:00 Houston Airport

0:30 A sound installation

1:12 Flight 875

1:35 Panama City Airport

2:35 Marketplace

3:34 Bird-natures

4:55 No habla taxi

5:12 Fort Amador, abandoned base

8:16 Deluge

9:07 Steve the pacifist

11:47 Good night

12:50 Valkyrie in the street

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