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:

17: White Sands

Take a flight out to New Mexico and explore the wonders of White Sands Missile Range, the largest military installation in the United States. I will walk around and point out various missiles in the park, and then let some of the museum video material speak for itself.

Listen:

8: A terrible noise

The thunderous jet noise described last time:




There is a lot more sound, but I'm off to Okinawa.

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Drawing the void

The void is an evocative theme. It works two ways, across a threshold. For the military, what lies outside the fence, as far as I have seen, is always represented on their maps as a blank region. And in city plans, the military base is a grey block, a chess piece which makes no move and can never be taken. There is an important difference with each type of "void space" here. From within the base, the world outside is an ocean, an expanse of otherness which laps at its shores but has no real effect there. From without, the military space is dense, solid, filled in. It may as well be a wall projected a thousand feet high. The military can virtually come and go as it pleases, but civilians must be screened, and only a select few--those who work there--have access.

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7: Korea On Base

The experience of walking onto a military base is truly stepping across into another world. This soundscraping also contains a dialogue with a retired Army Sergeant-Major and a visit to the Odusan Unification Observatory at the DMZ. Listen: