the illuminator

space type: maker, activism | neighborhood: ft. greene & all over | active since: 2012 | links: website, facebook, twitter

For many involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, the two-month anniversary last November was a galvanizing moment. As tens of thousands of activists marched over the Brooklyn Bridge, light projections suddenly appeared on the Verizon building nearby: things like “99%” “MIC CHECK” “#occupy,” and more. I was on that march and it was absolutely electrifying to see. We screamed and clapped and chanted, and the people driving by beneath us honked and cheered out their windows. It was an incredible moment.

image from Boing Boing

In the wake of that action, Mark Read, the one who pulled it off, decided that had been just the beginning. He talked it over with Ben Cohen, a longtime friend of the movement, who eventually agreed to fund the construction of a customized vehicle for mobile guerilla projections. The guy tapped to construct the unit was Chris Hackett—one of the rulers of the Brooklyn maker scene, and cofounder of the art combine Madagascar Institute. Unsurprisingly, Hackett built a formidable machine, and the Illuminator was born.

Mark put out the call and amassed a merry band of activists to bottom-line the project. The Illuminator has been a smashing success, riding through protests from OWS actions to Occupy Town Square performances, partnering with community groups like rent-strikers in Sunset Park and workers’ rights activists in Midtown, projecting slogans and pictures onto the Russian Consulate, the British Embassy, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Williamsburg Bridge, and on and on.

The Illuminator is at a crucial stage in their journey right now, because they’re about to lose their funding. So this is the last week of their Kickstarter campaign, which, if successful, will allow them not only to keep this van, but to build more for use around the country. You should absolutely donate to their fund, but first read my interview with some of the activists involved.

clockwise from top left: Lucky, Talia, Annabelle, Grayson, Mark, Dan

brooklyn spaces: What was the first outing and the first projection?
Mark: The debut was March 3rd, for Low Lives, a virtual online performance-art project. We went all over that night: Zuccotti Park, the Whitney Museum where we projected the cheap art manifesto from the Bread and Puppet Theatre, down to Cooper Union, and then to Chase Bank.

brooklyn spaces: Do you plan the art before each action? Do you make it yourselves? Where does it come from?
Lucky: We produce a lot ourselves, but the great thing about this is it really is a Occupy resource, and more than that, it’s an activist resource. We reach out to lots of groups around the city, like the Sunset Park rent-strikers and the Hot & Crusty workers, and the messaging always comes from the people we’re supporting.

brooklyn spaces: How do you decide what projects the Illuminator will get involved with?
Annabelle: Well, it started with the 99%, and anything that could fit into that. We did that first projection two days after the eviction from the park.
Talia: I think it has to come from a positive space, people have to be happy about it. There has to be that exciting kind of antagonism.
Lucky: I think this goes back to the collective way we’re run. When we want to do something, there’s automatically a dialogue. We all come from very disparate backgrounds—I’m a biologist, Annabelle is a union researcher, and Mark does media, just to name a few—which really enriches the project, because we bring so many different perspectives.

image by jenna pope photography

Mark: Here’s a funny example of something we wouldn’t do. We were contacted by Woody Harrelson, and he wanted us to do some marketing for his upcoming Off-Broadway play, Bullet for Adolph. We’ve done work for hire before; we do have to keep the van in gas and parking. But what he wanted us to project was “Adolph is coming.” He was willing to pay us ten thousand dollars, which of course we could have really used, but we just couldn’t do it, it was too awful.

photo by athena soules

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of the site-specific projections.
Lucky: When we do site-specific stuff, it’s more to do with the people who are rallying around the cause, or the cause itself. The van sort of becomes the hero, popping up and supporting causes, so when students go on an education strike, or renters go on rent strike, we’re part of those actions. There was the action with Occupy Tape, which was an action against Spectra, and we did a “Free Pussy Riot” projection on the Russian Consulate.

Mark: I think the first site-specific one was at Atlantic Yards. There was a mic check, a call-and-response thing about what had happened with the Barclays Center, and a piece that was produced by our community partner in that case, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn. The police were all over us that night and we sort of had to outwit them, which has been the case several times since. It was like a cat-and-mouse game.

brooklyn spaces: So the cops are not too fond of the Illuminator.
Dan: Like with the rest of Occupy, there’s a pattern of repression. The police want to disrupt people coming together, and the Illuminator rallies people and gets them excited, so we’re the last thing they want. Often they shut us down by making things up. I got a summons for disorderly conduct that we went to court for, and they didn’t even prosecute it because they knew it was bullshit. Another time they came out with a ticket already written and then asked “How is this projector mounted?” I said, “It’s bolted to this steel bar which is welded to the frame of the vehicle.” And they were like, “Um, this is a danger to pedestrians. It might fall off.”
Lucky: It’s about claiming contested space. In Zuccotti we were occupying a physical park, but the Illuminator is after the advertising space, the commercialized space above our heads and in our eye-line. So it’s predictable that that same sort of repression would happen, because we’re doing something powerful by subverting the order of things, the way society is constructed in a corporatized way.

brooklyn spaces: What’s been the most meaningful part of this project for you all?
Mark: For me, getting away with things is pleasurable, and getting people excited in an action context is awesome. There’s also the pleasure of talking to strangers, having conversations about the state of affairs in this country and the world, the kinds of crises we’re facing, what it’s going to take to solve those problems. Once these young kids came up to us, totally excited, and said, “Are you guys with the revolution?” I was like, “I hope so!”
Lucky: One of my favorite moments was Independence Hall in Philly, because that was totally spontaneous, and it often feels better when you don’t overwork yourself with planning and details. We were driving down to D.C. and saw Independence Hall to our left and figured, “Why not?” and went and projected “99%” onto the building. And as it happened, there were a bunch of Occupiers right there who took pictures and tweeted it all over. This is sort of a media machine, and a critique of mainstream media is that it privileges special interests in voice. Occupy has done a lot to use the power of modern technology to amplify important stories, and the Illuminator does that really well.

Talia: For me the best is feeling like a part of this well-oiled activism machine, and in Philly it really gelled for me how powerful this is, doing that projection and then seeing our image bouncing all around the internet afterward.
Dan: It’s the most re-tweeted thing we’ve ever done, I think. But for me it’s also about the one-on-one stuff. One of my favorite Occupy chants is “Occupy will never die / Evict us, we multiply.” This is like a manifestation of that, because we can spread all over the city and even the country in a totally different way.
Talia: And since the Illuminator 1.0 is going to be shut down, the idea of multiplying, of 2.0, is awesome. One van is great, but it’s limiting. A broader, more mobile fleet all around the nation? That’s really exciting. There’s this brand new energy fueled by all our ideas for what we’ll do next.

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Like this? Read about more activism: #OWS art show, No-SpaceTime’s Up, Brooklyn Free Store, Books Through Bars, Bushwick City Farms, Trees Not Trash

swimming cities

neighborhood: gowanus (and the world!) | space type: art collective | active since: 2001 | links: website, blogfacebook, twitter

update, Nov 2011: Want to see some absolutely amazing photos from Swimming Cities’ incredible trip down the Ganges in India? Check ’em out on their blog here.

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With this post, I am thrilled to say that I’ve covered all the spaces that inspired me to start this project! Not that I intend to stop; I’m just really excited to have finally gotten to talk to everyone I’d initially set out to, and to celebrate all their crazy brilliance.

So let’s talk about the crazy brilliance of Swimming Cities. They’re a nebulous art collective of somewhere between ten and thirty people who build boats out of found materials and sail them all over the world. The boats themselves are essentially floating works of art, and the group does visual, musical, and dramatic performances atop them as they go. The first project, started by Orien and Callie (also known as Swoon), was the Miss Rockaway Armada (since splintered into its own collective), which went down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans in 2001. The next project, Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea, went down the Hudson River, from Troy to Deitch Projects in Long Island City, in 2008. Then in 2009, Swimming Cities of Serenissima sailed down the Adriatic Sea, starting in Slovenia and winding up in Venice to crash the Biennale. And now, in September 2011, Swimming Cities Ocean of Blood is making their way down the Ganges in India, starting in Farrukhabad and ending in Varanasi for the Diwali festival.

photo by Tod Seelie, from Arrested Motion

They’re a well-connected group in the Brooklyn underground & art communities. Over Swimming Cities’ history, all manner of artists and collectives have taken part, including members of the Madagascar Institute, the Toyshop Collective, the Infernal Noise Brigade, GreenBusTour, Black Label Bike Club, Flux Factory, and dozens more. Much of the initial work on the Ocean of Blood boats was done at Serett Metalworks, and they throw crazy themed fundraising parties at the Gowanus Ballroom, Electric Warehouse, Chicken Hut, the warehouse on Ten Eyck, 285 Kent, and lots of others. The collective is also naturally involved in the Burning Man community and participates in Maker Faire, often winning awards for their ingenious floating creations. You can donate to their Kickstarter campaign to help them get home from India, but first check out my interview with Orien (third from left) and crewmember Angie (far right).

Ocean of Blood crew

brooklyn spaces: How did this all get started?

Miss Rockaway Armada boat

Orien: I had a boat and was living on the Gowanus Canal, and Callie lived a few blocks away. We met at Pratt, and she would hang out on my boat and we’d talk about building a floating performance art space. Then I left and spent some time in India, and she did Miss Rockaway Armada with several other artists. After that we did the Hudson River and Venice projects together, and then Callie was giving the project up, so I asked her if I could keep it going. India was the obvious choice for me; it’s my favorite place. But there was a lot of ambiguity about whether this would actually happen. I’m not a famous artist, I don’t have any money, I don’t have backing. But it gradually gained momentum, and now Swimming Cities has a presence beyond its association with Swoon and the other projects.

boats in Venice, photo by Tod Seelie, from Brooklyn Street Art

brooklyn spaces: Before we get too much into India, what was it like being in Venice for the Biennale? How was the reception?
Orien: Being in Venice with a boat is so much fun. I don’t recommend going there if you can’t get a boat, it’s just going to drive you crazy. And the reception was great, everybody loved it. Except when we went into the Arsenale, which is a military base, like a fortified marina, this big square with water and some sort of promenade around it. We went in there with Dark Dark Dark playing on the roof we and tied up the boats, and they came and cut our lines and told us to fuck off. But come on, we basically came uninvited in junk boats, so of course they did that.

brooklyn spaces: Okay, so now tell me about India. How many of you are going over, how many boats do you have, how did you set it all up?
Angie: There’s five boats, eight people are going, and we have a couple of Indian people there. We sent a scout a few of months ago, and he lined up places for us to stay and to store stuff, and people to help us, and institutions and permits and things like that.
Orien: They government wanted to know what we were doing. They don’t want to be like, “Oh, you’re doing a performance? Great!” and then you get there and quarter a cow or do something really offensive. But we got a letter of support from the Ministry of Culture that says something like, “Your project is not specifically offensive to us from a cultural perspective.”

sketch for part of the Diwali performance

brooklyn spaces: The highest praise. What are the performances going to be?
Orien: We’ll be pretty far out on the water, so it’s not practical or logistically possible to have sound or a plot. It’s going to be a gradual, five-day visual performance with a very vague narrative. It’s kind of like architectural puppetry.
Angie: We’ll have a big mechanical sculpture involving lights and movement, and at the end the boats come apart.
Orien: It sort of demonstrates the function of what makes the object interesting.

five boats in radial formation, photo by Ben Mortimer

brooklyn spaces: What do you guys do in between trips?
Angie: We have a lot of events. Most of them are fundraisers, but this summer we did the Battle for Mau Mau Island in Gerritsen Beach, where we got all our friends to form boat gangs. There was a race, a battle, and boat jousting.

West India Day fundraiser, photo from Laughing Squid

brooklyn spaces: What’s your motivation for doing this?
Orien: I’m really interested in boats as pieces of architecture, as objects. I come from an industrial design background, that’s what I went to school for. And all these people really enjoy being a family and having a common goal that isn’t about money or the banality of the homogenized world of bullshit. So I just keep doing it. It’s a reaction to the alternative. To exist in the actual world isn’t really an option for me; if I don’t do this, what the fuck am I going to do?

Bordertown party at Electric Warehouse

“Caddywhampuss,” which won Best in Show at the 2010 Maker Faire, photo from Makezine

brooklyn spaces: What’s next for you guys?
Orien: We’re probably going to go to Russia, down the Volga river to Moscow. I really want to go to Lake Baikal, which is one of the world’s largest lakes, it represents one-sixth of the world’s fresh water. It’s got seals and underwater caves, it’s insanely deep, and it’s in the middle of Siberia, there’s nothing near it. And surrounding Moscow is the Golden Ring area, the oldest part of Russia, so you have this really old architecture and culture.

welding pontoons with a martini, photo by Mayra Cimet

brooklyn spaces: Are you inspired as an artist by being in Gowanus, or in Brooklyn in general?
Angie: We were totally lucky to have Josh get that shop on the Gowanus.
Orien: Oh yeah. We built the first boat in this tiny place on Nostrand Avenue, and then Josh was like, “Guess what? I’m getting a new shop and it’s insanely massive and it’s on the Gowanus Canal.” It was just the most ridiculous luck we’ve ever had. This project wouldn’t have happened without Josh and Serett, it literally would not have. But other than that, I don’t find New York especially inspiring. It’s basically an impossible place to get anything done.

brooklyn spaces: But overall, has this been a rewarding experience?
Orien: Definitely. I have all the things I was looking for. We have the best friends anyone could have. We have something to do that isn’t awful, that doesn’t contribute to the greater horror, that doesn’t hurt people. No one has gained anything from what we’re doing, except maybe the beer distributors. Other than that, no one’s getting rich off us, which is nice. That’s about all you can ask for.

photo from Pipe Dream Museum

Like this? Read about more art collectives: Monster Island, Hive NYC, The Schoolhouse, Bushwick Project for the Arts, Flux Factory