recent: remote was an interactive event at a former Cold War era Nike missile military base, located in a public park.
recent: remote was an interactive installation/ performance designed to examine our construction of history. On first entering the site, the audience saw fields, trees, sky – a secluded corner of the park. They were struck by the seeming lack of activity and a sense of decay. Overgrown paved roads led nowhere, foundations of long-gone buildings were crumbling into the ground, and silence pervaded.
As the audience began to explore the site, the piece gradually revealed itself. Subtle, nearly invisible images, messages and sounds were hidden in the landscape. They were buried underground, suspended in the trees, and scattered across the fields, discovered as the audience walks through the site. Cryptic messages were delivered in private conversations, and comments by other people were overheard. The instructions that each received in advance began to make sense, and gradually the audience uncovered another world lurking beneath the surface.
recent: remote took place at a former Nike missile military base that is now in a deserted section of a public park. The site was about a square mile, encircled by a fence from the military era, and paved roads crisscrossed the site. Around the perimeter were wooded areas. All the buildings had been demolished, but there were fragments strewn through the woods – strange pieces of cement and pipes, solitary lamp posts, remains of building foundations. In the middle was a large open field and an overgrown sand berm where the launch pads and missile vaults had been. You could dig down six inches and see the corners of the vault, and when you pounded on the ground, it echoed…
I embedded additional clues and materials in the landscape that focused on the different histories of the site, but especially on the Cold War – recent history that already feels remote. I buried old photographs from the location, of its mining and military days, that were viewed through periscope windows in the ground; I mounted surveillance cameras and tiny monitors in trees; voices emanated from the bushes, triggered by movement; nearly invisible texts were suspended in trees and scattered in fragments in the foundations; ticking was heard from underground; a message in Russian was mowed into the meadow, to be read from the air; a file cabinet deep in the woods, overflowing with printed material including maps, magazines, newspaper articles, Native American land claim cases, studies on the impact of the local mining industry, Cold War books and pamphlets published in the 50s and 60s.
Both the performers and the audience operated in the same role, as a combination of archeologist and undercover agent. Their task was to gather information on the artifacts on the site, and reconstruct its history based on those clues. But each person had initially been given different information about the history of the site, in addition to secret instructions for surveillance activities. It quickly became very ambiguous as to who was audience and who was performer, and who was telling you the truth and who was feeding you disinformation.
The dynamics of the event itself were very layered, as it branched out in multiple directions immediately. There were many incidents that occurred between individuals throughout the site, and no one could possibly see everything, or even encounter everyone. Each person’s experience of the event was only a fragment of the whole. If they had information on the mining history of that site, which some of them did, they read those fragments differently than the people who had the information about the Cold War history, which was different than the people who had the Native American history of the site.
A “Debriefing” in Seattle during the following week allowed us to record how people interpreted the event. It was also an opportunity for not only the audience but the performers as well to discover each other’s secret agendas, since no one knew the nature of others’ covert activities. There were real surprises- “deep cover missions” of which even I was not aware.
The participants also talked about how the experience of the event triggered their memories of the Cold War, and a particular kind of paranoia associated with that time. They were young and old, conservative and liberal, which resulted in a very lively, and at times heated discussion of that era. Did we ‘win’ the Cold War? Was our behavior justified? Is the war still going on?
