tom ainslie

book recommended to me by Gabriela. deals with the recent transformations of the LES.

NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression)
Had the first class Wednesday night. I’m feeling a hearty mix of excitement and dread with regards to this class. The theme for this semester is “Tools for the Remix.” The remix part is great. I’ve been an avid fan of electronic and hiphop music since I was a teenager, and the aesthetic of sampling has always fascinated me. During my senior year of high school my parents gave me a Boss SP-202 sampler for Christmas, and although I never showed much musical promise, I made a great deal of use out of it by constructing soundtrack elements for my video productions. NIME will give me an opportunity to attempt making music with the sampler once again.

My fear of this class comes from the “new interfaces” side of things. I’m by no means a physical computing superstar, and programming makes me a tiny bit queasy. I’m fairly certain that whatever controller I design will manipulate video as well as audio…. and the behavior of the video will most likely be a reaction to the music… nothing new in itself. I have a feeling the samples I collect will be largely MoTown based, but that’s subject to a lot of change at this point in the semester.

NIME!

My interest in the Detroit landscape begins with my affinity for electronic music. When I discovered the world of Detroit techno, and realized the ruins of the city seemed to be fostering creativity, that was “a moment” for me.

In high school I began to explore the city with friends. These explorations most often occurred during late night weekend hours. We would drive to parties located in abandoned factories and warehouses, routinely driving through decrepit neighborhoods and industrial wastelands to get there. These journeys represented an extreme contrast to the suburban comfort I was living in.

At around the same time I was getting heavily involved with video production through my school. However, it wasn’t until a few years later that I combined the two interests with a video piece about the Heidelberg Project in Detroit.

The Heidelberg Project is a neighborhood art installation put together by Tyree Guyton. He decorated an abandoned city block in one of Detroit’s most rundown areas with salvaged objects and trash, also painting his signature polka dots on the structures and nearby trees.

Upon seeing the Heidelberg Project in person, I was once again awed that a ruined city such as Detroit could inspire artists in such unique ways. The Heidelberg Project literally grew out of the city’s ruins, changing the depressed street into Detroit’s second biggest tourist attraction (until the mayor deemed it a blemish and attempted to bulldoze the block).

Both Detroit Techno and the Heidelberg Project sprouted from a similar idea: making the most out of available resources. The original musicians who made techno a worldwide phenomenon created their songs on throwaway synthesizers and drum machines that they had found in pawn and thrift shops around the city. While other musicians considered these instruments obsolete and dated, a few resourceful individuals utilized them in order to give birth to an entirely new genre of music.

Thinking about this, I realize that my favorite artwork seems to be that which appropriates artifacts of the past. My favorite musical genres are electronic and hip-hop, both of which are heavily influenced by the practice of sampling. The Heidelberg Project takes left-behind personal items from abandoned homes and displays them where anyone can see. So it seems that recontextualization (if that’s a word) comprises a large part of my interests.

During the Fall of 2004, I returned to Detroit with the goal of collecting video footage of abandoned structures within the city. Over the course of three days my friend Scott and I climbed into a number of abandoned structures: houses, a church, factories, and an apartment complex. Each location housed countless artifacts left behind by previous residents and workers. Although these structures had been sitting empty for as long as decades, the memories of the occupants permeated the musty atmospheres.

I returned to New York with about 6 hours of raw footage, mostly of interiors, and was immediately overwhelmed by the volume of video I had. Along with the footage I shot myself, I had also found an old VHS cassette and a spool of 16mm film in one of the empty auto factories.

A question I’ve been grappling with since starting this project has been whether I have a right to do this in the first place. In a certain sense I feel like I’m taking advantage of other peoples’ losses when I use the footage of these abandoned spaces, and especially when I use the actual home video footage found on the VHS tape. To begin with, I’m a suburbanite who drives into these locations for the day to videotape, and then I return to my parents’ home later that night. I don’t have to live in the environments where this abandonment exists, and therefore I’m an outsider, and as an outsider I feel I need to be sensitive of what exactly it is I’m using this footage for.

The answer to that at the moment is: I don’t know.

a possible metaphor… more on this later

book referenced in Emergence

http://www.heidelberg.org/

Jamie recommended that I check this guy out. Apparently he was a city planner for NYC around mid-century who displaced a lot of neighborhoods with the construction of the westside highway and other urban renewal projects… could be useful.

assignment #1 for Methods of Motion: make something using the software program “array”.

The New American Ghetto by Camilo Jose Vergara
Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Emergence by Stephen Johnson
Godfrey Regio films (Koyaanisqatsi, Naqoyqatsi)
The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit
Forgotten Detroit