"Second" impressions

“Second“ impressions Having spent one more week here, filled with more talks and tours through various parts of the city, it’s time to write down some second impressions. What struck me most is the concern and love of all people here in Detroit for the city they live in. There does exist a certain idea of what Detroit ought to be: a town in which the experiment on the post-fordist , post neo liberal society is taking shape. An experiment with an unknown outcome, but based on ideas and beliefs the local counts more than the national, based on convictions the Detroiters are in this situation all together and need eachother to make the experiment work. Whether that be by buying local, by social networking in your town, or by supporting eachother in all one does makes no difference now. The belief is here that people need to do it themselves, independent of the structures that characterized the fordist system. Politics and politicians? To be laughed at. Companies and other institutions? Not concerned with people. So everybody works in non profit organisations. Some get paid for their work, others live of food stamps to have their NGO function on the highest profile possible.

This indeed is all very beautiful, but it brings up some tough questions: In the limbo-ism of this moment cooperations work out fine, but how will the future with some more organized models influence this way of working? How will Detroiters deal with the influx of people and money from out of town? Can the love and desire for making Detroit work again survive the phase of self obsessedness that naturally stems from it? How will Detroiters deal with the outside world putting various stamps on the city? The future might be less bright for some of the ideas that seem so vivid today.

Why one marshmallow is sometimes enough

I am not able to keep up with Jonas' speed and quantity of writing, but I will try and at least write something meaningful in my own, more compact style...
The work continues. I have finished writing my half-hour, three thousand word performance text, and am now busy memorising it (or since we are in the USA, that should be memorizing). This is a very tedious process, although thankfully one that I am quite experienced with now.
Following my experiments last week with the bicycle wheel, I am now building an more advanced camera dolly. So far the results are great - a small test can be seen below.

The piece I am working on focusses on some themes related to the reason for our residency here: growth, decay, progress and success (and to what extent these are subjective concepts), and the idea of “enough” - that is to say, the state of being in which you cease to desire more.
As an example of the sort of accepted wisdom which I am attempting to be critical of can be seen in the following quote:

“In one US experiment, researchers put five-year-olds in a room with a marshmallow. The children were told that if it [sic] could wait 15 minutes without touching it, they would be offered a second marshmallow. Despite the inducement, the vast majority of the children ate it before the time limit was up.“ - www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14412025

The point which intrigues me is: why are they assuming that two marshmallows are better than one? Why is more always better? Can they not see that these children - apart from being impatient (although who would really want to spend 15 minutes in a room staring at a marshmallow?) - were perhaps quite satisfied with only one? How strange it is that adults cannot see this.
This may seem like quite an odd thing to be mentioning in relation to this residency in Detroit - but in fact it completely gets to the heart of what has been preoccupying me the whole time here. The life which people are able to carve out here despite the odds, against the grain of what seems rational with respect to accepted values, is clear evidence of the cracks in the system which chooses to condemn Detroit.

“Detroit has to be deprived of its reality so that everyone else can feel better about theirs.” - Herron, J. - AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History

Or in other words, it is necessary for the city to be written off as a failure so that inhabitants of more traditional, “successful” cities can go on believing that the old system is working. Recent events are beginning to show that this self-deception cannot continue for long.
No-one can deny that, by all normal measures, Detroit is a total failure as a city. There is no getting away from the fact that life is hard for a great many people here, with many practical difficulties. On a functional level, many things which are normally taken for granted as a part of city life simply do not work.
But people stay here - and new people come here - for a reason. Politicians like to use evocative words like “hope” and “opportunity” to explain the mentality of Detroit, but I would say that the reasons are more concrete and down-to-earth than that: the unique atmosphere of Detroit is proof that another life is possible which does not involve a big-name chain store on every corner, ever-increasing house prices, gentrification, superficial image makeovers (although there have been plenty attempts), or a new car (or back home, bakfiets) in front of every house. There are so many initiatives which I have seen here, and in each case I been painfully aware of the countless reasons why it could not happen back home - lack of space, regulation, real-estate prices, the wagging finger of the law. Who is really the success and who is the failure? That is the nagging question which will be, I think, the lasting reminder of my time in this city.

Interesting links about Detroit...

I guess we could also see this blog as an intro to Detroit for outsiders and for

European artists in residence to come...so I will just post some links to the history of

Detroit Techno and the city in general for people who wants to know more.

For people who are about to come, already here in body or in spririt.

1.

Here a link about the Detroit Electronic Music festival...sometimes called Movement,

at other times it is called something else. I came a bit too late for this one, usually held in the end of may, could maybe be great start for the 9 week air period.

Knowing that for a LOT of Euro people who wants to come here, Techno is one of the great reasons...

This link is nice because it is just one liners and gossip from all the Detroitian Techno legends who with tears in their eyes could for the first time make mom and pop understand what a monster that they have unleashed on the rest of the world. This was the first time, that average people in Detroit could kind of grasp how HUGE techno is outside of Detroit (and USA).

http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1186

2.

A nice documentary about Techno music (from Detroit).

With a lot of insider gossip and jealousy

which makes you understand a lot about the city and the scene.

Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May got to become best friends after Kevin knocked Derrick May out with a couple of punches!!!!

Funny to see how slick Derrick is, you can kind of understand that someone wants to punch him out, but also very charming of course.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIEbkSpNXGE

(part 1 of 9)

3.

Underground Resistance documentary (10 min),

Where you get a feel for their anger with the world of corruption and decay

but also the love for the music

and the political dedication and general passion...VERY good!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI4cBPgETnU

4.

A very nice and well produced video documentary about the legendary Richie Hawtins

(aka Plastikman from Windsor, across the river...). Very informative about Detroit techno

and scene...very good!

Also nice is the different vibe of white boy Richie and Mad Mike Banks,

They compliment each other to tell the same story...but different!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc6474KUBV8

5.

Ok French documentary on Detroit Techno, but everyones speaks English...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSX_r0u3uzE

6.

Critically acclaimed docu. about the rise and fall of Detroit by Julian Temple, who also did

a couple of very famous Sex Pistols film...very beautiful!

http://rutube.ru/tracks/3971045.html

7.

Johnny Knoxville (of Jackass fame) tried to go against the grain and NOT do a classical film about Detroit...i.e. "ruin porn", crime, decay and how BAD things are in Detroit.

But an uplifting Detroit LIVES! film...

(by the way "ruin porn" is not what I first thought it was...it means people who are obssessed with taking photos of ruins in Detroit (usually Europeans or defenitely "out of towners",

much despised by the locals, who are quite sensitive about it...and quite sensitive about a LOT of things.

Despite Johnny's good intentions to "do the right thing" it STILL backfired...

The Detroitians were pissed off that most people who were interviewed for this film where "New York Hipster"people with money who just moved in to poor Detroit to escape the high loft rents of Williamsburg.

Oh well...at least Larry Mongo is in the film, he IS from Detroit and never left!

Even people FROM Detroit who lived in New York for two years!!! and then came back are suspect in the eyes of the die hard Detroitians

They're a VERY hard crowd to please...

I am trying to tell people in Detroit to chill out a bit and not be soooo pissed off all the time.

In Amsterdam we also get tons of American tourists coming to smoke pot with a VERY one sided interest in what Holland has to offer. If we would go and be pissed off in Amsterdam the whole time about it, we wouldn't have any energy left!

Detroit people needs to relax and accept that the ruins are unique in the western world and that that is partly the reason why people come here in the first place (and spend money)

so chill out a bit and just go with the flow!

We are all very sorry that we were not born in Detroit and that we weren't here when the car industry broke down, or that we haven't lived here since 1973 or...or...or...

We apologize for ALL that, but we will still come to Detroit to take photos of your ruins.

So BACK OFF!!!!...local angry guy....You're blocking the view of the ruins!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMysMDHdb4

US example

As we all know by now, Dutch parliament want the market to steer society.

'For your convenience we are providing the following gratuity calculations'

For the culture policy the State secretary of the Netherlands uses the American system as example. In the near future this is what we need to write down first in everything that is written about and through art.

party bus

Having to re-thing on how to construct a social event that evolves around an object, but still stay true to our non-tangible performative practices, we came up with an idea of hosting a final tour around the city on a bio-diesel bus.
The YES FARM became a bus station, and passengers had to obtain a ticket from a temporary stand inside the space.
We decided on three travel routes and planned four bus rides, inviting all the people we had encountered during our stay in the city.



All passengers were given a questionnaire to fill in while they were waiting at the YES FARM station. Questions evolved around the notions of "living in Detroit" and "leaving from Detroit" and worked as a starting point to our discussions on the bus.



While on the bus, we decided to stop beating around the bush and pose themes of discussion in a slightly more explicit manner than before. We chose to be as laconic as possible and generate fruitful conversations among the passengers. We mostly listened allowing members of the group to reflect on each others' statements.



The tours were recorded and the responsibility of visual documentation was passed to the passengers. A photo camera was given to a member of every group allowing to capture stills of what was happening inside as well as outside the bus.

Recordings as a well as additional photos will be posted shortly.

making your own fuel (and leave ukraine in peace for a winter or so)

today we met jeanne, one of the most wonderful women i have seen.

she, besides many other things, creates her own fuel from a garage that she traded for a diesel truck.

she has been setting her fuel space for a couple of years now, and has processed waste organic fuel into vegetable oil that can be used to power diesel engines, diesel generators, and oil heating systems.

i contacted her, about the possibility of making a biodiesel station for the yes farm, and her reply was 'why dont you come to work with me? it took me a while and about 50 g's to put all this together. i'm happy to exchange company while doing it for the passing of knowledge i have gathered...', i hear through the phone.

so i talk with eric, the guy that saved the muffler, and we both went down to jeanne's garage, and his eyes where shinning with the imagination for all the potentialities that cheap vegetable fuel brings.

he starts talking about diesel generators that are usually used in welding workshops, and the shift between fossil to vegetable fuel, the possibility of using it on oil heating systems for the winter (in detroit winter temperatures can go down to -29º c) and last but definately not the least, the application to cars engines.

he has the mechanical knowledge of how generators and engines can process the fuel and produce energy, which is complementary to jeanne, that holds the knowledge of how the chemical process of transforming waste organic fuel into biodiesel.

i think to myself 'if these two persons meet and start working together, will be a great synergy, a 1+1=3...'

somehow, back here in the states, there are very few diesel cars. most diesel engines are only found in trucks, with a few exceptions, while back in europe is pretty much standard that cars run on diesel. the european concern resides in the fact that diesel pollutes far more than a free lead gasoline engine, and the fact of not possessing many petroleum primary resources.

even natural gas is coming from the East Block. Pipelines maps reveal foreign politics, and winter conflicts.

after some google research, and finding out that the first biodiesel car was invented back in 1893, one cannot but wonder why it was never developed.

right now, i'd love to see a detroit diesel v8 engine installed in shubhabah and start off working a day a week with jeanne and make fuel for the van, besides some more for a diesel generator for my own home, and maybe even start saving some fuel for this coming winter. and daydreaming continues...

i come back to farns and talk about this with some people, and they all apreciate the idea, but dont seem very entusiastic about it. i wonder why... why not jump on the idea and start working together. dont know if its because detroit moves slowly, that everyone is busy with sorting themselves out, on a everyday basis, that disables them to combine efforts.

maybe its my naivity as an accidental tourist, but i cannot stop being amazed with jeanne and her energy in creating a better future with her shinny eyes, and generous smile.

in my second day working, i meet rick and his girlfiend, anna, that are helping jeanne out. we get our first trouble solving. one of the pumps is not working, that is supposed to transfer the waste oil from the settling storage, into the machine that warms and stirs it up, separating the water from the oil, the first process, transforming waste oil into veggie oil... actually in summer, jeanne runs her mercedez turbo diesel just on that.

though in winter, with the cold temperatures, the oil tends to freeze, needing to be diluted with some kind of spirits. the biodiesel is produced by adding methanol and methaoxide (fuel used for racing cars and highly toxic).

none of this technology is new, there has been others doing it all over the place.

i'm interested in it, due to its bare necessity as a survival and political act of defying a system, wether its capital or governmental, that has been establishing a form of progress in a non-relyable and non-sustainable usage of petrol, rather than supporting a cheaper and more planet friendly way of producing energy.

or in a more simple way to state it, breaking the status quo you MF!!!!

audio recording of SOUP event, with timecode for easy listening

a preliminary study on hosting dinners and food for thoughts, and first encounters with engagement art

(or why we are looking for a balance between intervention and integration)

Soup audio documentation by anonymous bystanders

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// timecode :

00:00:00 //waiting for the soup to get cold

00:01:16 //'are we recorded?'

00:02:19 //joao and nicos double checking script for evening, after realizing that the audience number was double than usual

00:04:24 //smoking a cigarette outside mexican bakery, 4330 West Vernor Highway

00:06:06 //'got to give a lil'congo up there man'

00:06:16 //'hey, er.. you wanna crawl under that truck tomorrow?'

00:07:38 //preparing to start

00:08:04 //looking for a frying pan to hit on

00:09:39 //beginning announcement

00:13:15 //one hundred and twenty persons serving soup, salad and desert

00:21:09 //joao meets mark and jake

00:22:20 //'what kind of soup is this?'

00:26:29 //niko joins the conversation with mark and jake

00:29:48 //'the last piece of bread...'

00:30:43 //joao gets niko's bag from under someone's bottom

00:31:25 //'thank you guys for ... '

00:32:29 //nikos and joao look for the right moment to start the show talk dinner

00:32:48 //two unknown persons talk about sitting devices

00:33:21 //joao, miserably, attempts to get audience attention by playing the piano

00:33:36 //dutch eric saves the day by whistling, which joao and nikos dont know how to do

00:33:42 //'hello! its us again.' nikos and joao start the show talk dinner

00:36:17 //the idea of agency - a sketch and a question, third parties and communities

00:40:55 //a (failed) attempt to go high-fi and the uselessness of a microphone

00:41:45 //an everyday life performance of taking care

00:42:47 //re-arrangements of space, inability to use a microphone-part 2 and 'it has been five weeks...' - a series of interrupted acts and thoughts

00:43:38 //urban farming in detroit and over there, when art becomes social intervention and alternatives it creates

00:45:05 //'lets quit the high-tech shite' ... giving up on the microphone and the simple act of talking louder

00:46:38 //'a better future...'

00:48:30 //on staging social events and so-called realities

00:51.33 //quoting 'art in america' and recalling the experience in D, doing and agency

00:54:17 //skype sounds in the back, promising an unexpected appearance

00:54:44 //actually it's not that different at all

00:55:19 //'necessity is the mother of all invention'

00:58:52 //mistranslations, rephrasing ones thoughts, and how to agree on disagreeing

01:03:50 //'entitlement mentality', 'the system has failed us' and 'who's teaching our children?'

01:05:53 //'one last comment and lets go for the soup proposals'

SOUP Sunday 1st August

It's been great collaborating with Kate. Experimenting on the structure and the possibilities of social interaction within the structure, she took the initiative to invite us to "host" the 7th SOUP evening.
We met with Kate yesterday evening to check again the location and elaborate more on the format of the upcoming event.



DETROIT SOUP
Sunday 1st August.
7.00pm - dinner 8.00 pm
Above Mexicantown Bakery Detroit, MI
SOUP on facebook

the land of doers

"doer - inch man" Jerry.

" ...the idea of opportunity, a chance to start a new, to strike it rich, to have a piece of land of one's own, to worship as one wished, to save souls, to build an empire, to try to get once more to realize the Utopian dreams that have haunted the mind of man from the beginning of recorded time."
Richard McLanathan, "Art in America: A brief history" p. 10

"The style of life produced by the New World environment strengthened their emphasis on the practical over the theoretical, leading them to prefer the doer to the thinker."
Richard McLanathan, "Art in America: A brief history" p. 11

Keeping my promise to go deeper to the initial intentions and goals of LOVELAND i mailed Jerry Paffendorf requesting a face to face talk. I attach the mail for matters of clarity:

Dear Jerry,

My name is Nikos Doulos and I am involved together with Joao Evangelista in a residency program in the city of Detroit, organized by Expodium Platform For Young Artists (NL), The Yes Farm and Galleria 555.
We visited Block Party a couple of days ago and got a bit introduced to your LOVELAND project. To be honest i had come across your website a couple of months ago back in the Netherlands, but i was quite hesitant to participate.
Having spent three weeks in the city of D and trying to grasp the ethics of LOVELAND, I got myself involved in a series of discussions with various people in Detroit. There seems to be a great division between "followers" and "haters" (probably bad choice of words but i guess you get the picture).
Still incapable to built a concrete view on the project, I felt the urge to contact you in person in the hope of engaging you in a discussion that could clarify question-marks i have in regards to LOVELAND.
Me and my residency partner will be staying in Detroit until the 29th August. If you are planning to visit the city I would appreciate a face to face meeting with you, otherwise we could arrange a virtual discussion through skype.
I truly hope it would be something you would consider yourself doing.
Looking forward to hearing from you.

Nikos

Jerry's response was immediate and we managed to meet yesterday at Kass Cafe.

What stroke me most in our discussion was his enthusiasm to introduce us to the "insides" of his project, referring to previous actions and future plans.
Jerry is a doer.
Initiating something that is getting more and more complex, he described his act as a "cool thing to do", a project that evolves and re-shapes based on the problematics and solutions that pop-up on the way. Embracing negative criticism and misinterpretations he is totally in favor of "adaptability". With a background in Second Life design and programming, he is extremely fascinated in merging actuality with the virtual world.

To me LOVELAND is a non over-conceptualized gorilla tactic kinda like project. His obsession to maintain a certain playfulness in the way LOVELAND deals with social matters could be easily misinterpreted but is certainly innovating and of high interest.

To make things clear, I am not propagating in favor of buying 1 inch land in Detroit, but I am certainly asking to give this guy the benefit of a doubt.
Coming from a land where contextualization and analytical thought tends to weaken the agency in terms of an art practice, I cannot help but show respect to the doers, especially if they are open to discussions and criticism. After all we are here to stand in favor "learning by doing", or aren't we?

downtown synagoge D.

Dan Land and Gabe Hall's trippy video projections

Saturday night we joined the Block Party taking place in the Downtown Synagoge. The party was an one night event in the synagoge and Cafe D'Mongo's. Dan Land, one of the guys responsible for the projection on the windows of the space guided us through the first floor and gave us a brief description of what the event was all about.
On the ground floor, local artist Marianne Audrey Burrows was painting a giant mural while Lightning Love were performing live.



Friends by LIGHTNING LOVE!

Block Party was a "inch-vestors" event in relation to the LOVELAND Micro-Real Estate, an organization that sells virtual space in an online "micro-hood" for $1 per square-inch as a fundraiser for real places in Detroit.
I remain a bit hesitant about joining the cause, not in the sense of applying hard core criticism to the idea but due to my inability to identify the ethics around me performing that act. So LOVELAND guys and supporters bare with me for a while, and I promise to get back to it as soon as I have a clearer view.

PS. Needless to say that the space is captivating - to say the least.

KT's brain

Kt is one of the founders of The Yes Farm, an artist initiative created in 2008 at the corner of Fransworth and Moran St.

Gentrification processes in San Fransisco led her to the decision of leaving the city and a community of 16 artists and move to Detroit.
She has been living in Fransworth St. for almost 4 years now.
Looking for a residence in a community that could identify with her life style and practices, she engaged herself in a "house hunt" of approximately 50 locations until she decided to move to her current base.

She is responsible for several gardens withing the city, teaches in summer courses of gardening and art for children and has a strong moral awareness of where she is spending her energy and money.


"artists can live everywhere as long as it's free"

Having a clear understanding of Detroit's potentiality, she believes artist initiatives and farming activities to be major players in the remaking of the city.

She considers gentrification to be an unavoidable effect but is in constant critical re-evaluation of the causes and processes that constitute and enhance it.

We like Kt.

SOUP

We visited SOUP a couple of days ago.
SOUP is a monthly event in the middle of Mexican Town involving visual artists, performers, musicians etc.
It started six months ago and initiated a quite interesting funding system.

Every visitor gets to pay an entrance fee of 5 dollars.

Artists, Performers and musicians offer soup and get 10 min within the venue to present a proposal for an art work and subsequently claim the amount of money gather during the night.



The proposals have already been printed out and spread around the tables and participants get to vote at the end of the night determining where the selected funding should go to.

Considering SOUP as a fruitful platform of exchange we are seriously consider "making" the soup for the August meeting.

on redefining critical discourse and the proliferation of small miracles

this coming July 12th - 30th 2010 there will be a 3-week intensive class on 'Abandoned Practices – something out of the ordinary' at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.

its hosted by members of a company named Goat Island, which i spent some time with, back in 2006 in Cork, Ireland.

bellow is a quote of their working philosophy, which i find pretty amazing:

"We want to keep the creative mind engaged as we engage the critical mind. Critical does not mean negative. It means discerning, or able to separate into parts. Whatever we look at, the spot upon which we focus our energy seems to proliferate.

If we focus on a problem, we start to see problems everywhere. We become one who is defined by the perception of the proliferation of problems. Because of this approach, the creative mind often seems to shut down when critical discourse starts.

If we focus on a miraculous moment instead, we start to see miraculous moments everywhere. We become one who is defined by the perception of the proliferation of miracles.

Try the second of these approaches. Think of a creative response as your own work that would not have existed without the work you are responding to. Start with the most obvious miraculous moment that you see in the work. What is obvious to you may not be obvious to anybody else.

You may have an association with that moment. You may want to echo it, multiply it, or work from it in some other way. Work out from that moment. The moment may have been intentional or accidental. Instead of a moment, your starting point might be a structural element, a visual element, a spatial element – anything.

We want to destabilize the boundaries between critical modes and the creative modes in order to enrich them both."

quote from http://www.goatislandperformance.org/creativeResponse.htm

http://www.abandonedpractices.org/course.html

while flies slide my screen, i post some usefull and no-usefull links

hi there, bellow are excerpts of my email correspondence with a guy called Theun.
he's a pretty decent fellow, you should meet him one day. you can have some pretty laughs while travelling on a train, or working on a film set.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////
While you're there you might want to take a look at this initiative:

http://tinyurl.com/32wc9yy

It's a new view of culture and economy based on a different way of looking at work.
The way labour is structured, with the level of wages and keeping as few people in in the production end of things as possible, is reaching its limits. New technologies like digital fabrication, make it possible for small groups of people to do what until recently could only be done by large companies. This initiative looks at the chances these new technologies offer to small communities.
The guy at the root of it is called Fridjof Bergmann. I think the first community is starting up here, but I'm not sure if there is anything happening yet at the location:

http://tinyurl.com/2ds78gz


We spoke on the train a while back about alternative economics.
And this week the Bijlmer Euro is launched.

http://www.bijlmereuro.net/?lang=en

Also interesting maybe my friend Dougald's initiative:

http://collapsonomics.org/


-t