I

21-5-14 Blanca – Murcia – Alicante – Murcia – Corvera – Murcia – Blanca

This is the first post of a series of post in the next days –  a residency diary.

After the Performance at the beautiful Practicas Contemporaneas at Centro Negra I stayed in Blanca where I will be located for the next week, going back and forth between Centro Negra of AADK and the  Fonoteca Archive for the investigations….

Yesterday was a really complete day: I did the first expedition to the Corvera International Airport. Before picking up the rental car at Alicante, at the estacion de autobuses in Murcia I ran into an older german guy who got robbed and left without laptop, money, passport, etc… I bought him a bus ticket to

Alicante, so we went on the same bus. He turned out to be a lawyer from Berlin and once was number 56 in the chess toplist. Both facts may have caused him being quite a wise ass and despite his desperate situation he knew everything better and became more and more pesado. I just wanted to get back to town to start the filming and finding the airport..  After an annoying car ride I dropped him off back in Murcia with a 100,- in his pocket and a piece of paper with my bank account written on . I felt it was a bad deal. I should have given him 200,- the minute we met and leave him without a comment. Sometimes it s better to be ruined and have no discussions. Try to  explain it to a lawyer.

But he explained me how speculation is working. And how people get rich by this giant projects putting the IVA / Mehrwertsteuer in their pockets. I believed him but didn´t really understand all the details.

Of course everyone in the region knows where the airport is situated and it was not that hard to get there.. Nevertheless: on google maps navigation the airport  is not tagged and I had to look for coordinates & streetnames nearby..

Arriving at the airport. I shot some video from outside  and then just went in by car till I got stopped on a barrier. A friendly security guy. But no way to convince him spontaneously to let me in.

I interviewed Abraham Hurtado this morning about his thoughts about airports,  the daily use and appropriate dosis of it. I ll transscribe that text later and use it for the video.

Working on the project will give me also the possibility uploading some fieldrecordings to aporee maps. The first piece of sound I uploaded is an ambient recording of a sudden electricity blackout in Blanca at night which lasted several minutes:

more to come..

The next afternoon I began researching at the Fonoteca about experimental sound approaches to airports, checking various releases of experimental music related to airports..  I listened to all the Music I could find

by just typing airport into the search engine of the SONM Archive

The titles I found gave hints: Michael v. Hauswolff: THREE OVERPOPULATED CITIES BUILT BY SHORT SIGHTED PLANNERS AND UNBALANCED AND QUITE DANGEROUS AIRPORT AND AN ABANDONED CHURCH.

And another title called Tinkling (killing time in an airport lounge and getting arrested) by Yannis Kyriakides.

and there was much more. While listening the sounds mixed with the church Bells close to the Puertas de Castilla , where the SONM Archive is situated, and the sounds of the tape machine running in the background.

This discrete set of sounds dividing time into slices of more or less equal length.

II

22-5-14 The Natural History Museum of Sound

Listening to Rinus van Alebeeks Cassette The Natural History Museum of Sound at the SONM. Reading the Inlay tele ports & time travels you on a journey to Sidi Ifni in 2002. A short story, more a poem. The upside down landscape format of tape inlays  reminds me of roman papyrus scrolls.

Think I should give up writing everything in English and just mix the phrases as they appear in my head. Some sentences lose so much sense when translated.

Is there a short cut to a short cut? I want to take some closeup pics of the inlay and thought of a d.i.y. microsope I saw on the Science Hack day in Berlin not long ago. Well, despite the fact that i dont have a laser pointer to break into parts I just put a little spit on the smartphone lens that works as a macro lens converter. maybe.

III

24-5-2014 the blind spot  – der blinde Fleck – el punto ciego

More uploads the last days of sounds of Blanca and Murcia to aporee maps. Still, the native airport sounds are missing and i hope i have time to get there again for fieldrecordings. Filmed the street signs at night that gives hints to the airport. some are covered with black tape, andere sind intakt und nur wie mit einem Schlüssel angekratzt. Die Tage gab es eine Demo gegen die Verschwendung von Steuergeldern pünktlich zum morgigen Wahltermin.

Die Nacht ist schwarz und der Flughafen nur mit 2-3 Spots beleuchtet. Die Strassen leer.

Para escuchar como la investigacion suena al Sonm:

Empece a editar material de video y render algunos archivos..

Working and researching on a specific topic makes you sensitive for all kinds of infos connected to them, and and of course , airports pop up everywhere..

and I remember a sound i recorded in an airplane starting from San Francisco Airport back to Berlin in 2012:

(click to listen)

it s all these times at airports we re idle. and being idle and busy, like the new binary philosophy of modern man, converges strangely. It is not free time, it s being on hold, like in the press button process when you call your phone company. IT doesn´ t leave you alone.

IV

28-5-2014  Poetry , thoughts and signs

Yesterday last filmshooting around the airport. Abschied.  I gave up on getting in. The blind spot.

I reread Rinus Text full of sound and Life. I asked Pierce Warnecke to send me his beautiful thoughts about airports as we discussed that topic before:

Tomorrow’s Cathedrals

One of the most interesting man-made spaces in our modern world is the airport. More than hubs for incessant rhizomatic connectivity, more than miniature collages of contemporary cultural signs and symbols, they are monumental homages built all over the world to our unique modern god: time. This subject of worship is absolute now more than ever, making airports the new temples.

They belong to no country and function permanently, like strange ships sailing outside of space and time. This timelessness is necessary, since they must function according to the local and many distant clocks of their faithful attendees. But at the same time, in our era of instantaneous exchanges, they are reminders of the last limitation we face in order to maximize our minutes and hours; practically everything we do has been transferred to virtual immateriality and light speed, yet these huge human sorting machines bear witness to the fact that the last frontier of our optimal acceleration and growth is our physical body.

I can’t help but imagine a distant time when, thanks to whatever technological breakthrough, physical transportation becomes unnecessary and these immense architectural exceptions (most of them flamboyant personal landmarks of the architect to himself or status symbols of the city or state financiers) are forsaken, cracked and crumbled. I see them then as I see churches and cathedrals now, landmarks of past eras when other things mattered and different gods were worshiped. I imagine them being rediscovered, and the sense of awe one might feel in their empty grandeur, the incomprehensible mystery of their forgotten function.

I see them already as witnesses of past glory, when after centuries of pushing and pulling we rose into the airs for a few brief moments before this was surpassed by a better means; to me they are even now already temples to another period when minutes mattered, hours were counted and time was of the essence.

I see them as tomorrow’s cathedrals.

P. Warnecke, June 2014

Before Abraham took me on a trip to another kind of oversized and underaged ruin not too far from Blanca: What should become a luxury golf resort ended  as  a Mad Max version of an upper class dream holiday. Verlassene Gebäude, vertrocknende Palmen in der Wüste. Encontre un cuaderno en el suelo escrita con  tinta azul una lista larga de imobilarias españolas. Añadido algunos comentarios en rojo como NO LLAMAR!!!.

empeze´ con el proceso de feedback. proyectando 2,50min de material y grabarlo en celuloide.

y preparando la performance en el SONM. La performance sea la base , el inicio por el montaje de la pieza mas tarde en junio.

V

31-05-14 A Fata Morgana &  minimal Stone Henge

y ya me voy. aqui un log con muchos vacios, espacios, huecos.

la noche en blanca.

un minimal stonehenge? cerca de corvera?  quisas..

last nights performance transformed the erased airport signs into decaying images of erased airport signs.  la base por el montaje final.

Auf der Suche nach Safran und der verlorenen Farbe Spaniens: Purpur

Lisa speaks Rinus´ text into her phone.

Dictators and Sports. Somehow reminds me of the Street Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ring in Mainz, Germany.

My latest impression of the airport is the heated up air flimmering over the black asphalt. Como agua.

un poco de magia en el punto ciego. el calor llevando imagenes desde el lejano. la dispersion chaotica.

10-6-2014 Berlin:

volviendo a berlin el dia 31 de mayo desde Alicante. Esperar a un vuelo unas horas, en un aeropuerto de verdad, que sensacion estraña. la multitud. mucho tiempo , mucha velocidad. el duty free. todo este mundo que nos juega trucos de velocidad.

Processando el material en Berlin y empiezo a editar piezas para luego juntarlas.

to be continued editando….

 21-8-14 “Die versiegelte Zeit”

zurück am Schnittplatz, mehr Material und mehr material

tomorrow i m going on a bus trip on the B E R , berlins new Cathedral:. You can book a guided tour on Berlins most expensive ruin. The press text sais: “Flughafen einmal anders. Nicht nur Passagiere, auch Besucher kommen an den Flughäfen auf ihre Kosten. Ob Flughafentour in Schönefeld mit Blick hinter die Kulissen, Infotower, Bus- oder Fahrradtour am BER – es gibt viel zu entdecken. Die Flughafentouren finden grundsätzlich auf Deutsch statt. Es besteht jedoch die Möglichkeit, BER-Touren auf Englisch zu vereinbaren.  ”

They changed their opinion about visitors quite rapidly. I asked in january if theres a chance to access the airport to take some pictures and got this answer:

editing makes the fracture visible. Digital material, re-filmed footage, original super8 footage , smartphone recordings, screenshots.

A lot of work for the sonics to glue together (or tear apart even more) these fragments.

Lisa Müller-Trede recorded new voice overs in the studio. I found Rinus van Alebeeks DIKTAT

in my mailbox and the sounds on that cassette enhanced my room to unknown spaces in NYC. There are still these Cassettes, A´s and B´s, reel to reel. Another path. man will die orte der kassetten auf einer landkarte einzeichnen und miteinander verbinden. die orte der schlafenden Flughafenruinen ebenfalls.

12-10-2014

edits, and sounds. re-listens and test renderings.

setting up the alchemist val de omaresque laboratory.

9-11-2014

performing in the black cube that symbolized somehow the airport, the blind spot, and the camera, the image production process, was a strange experience. images flickering, fading, people attending on both sides of the screen. the lab looked devastated after 2 days of workshops. one projector gave up .  alles in allem wunderbar.

the final rendering was a vague process, feedback between video and sound, como acabar, como dejar algo que se queda siempre “in contruction” ? gente empieza contar historias sobre proyectos parecidos: ciudades sin habitantes, una estacion de tren sin banos, las locuras diarias de la especulacion a nivel global.

things vanish thinking about them too long. like a  word loses meaning when you repeat it 4, 6 times

the feedback is one such thing. it changes everything into another entity, whatever origin it has. the statue close to the airport gets filmed, and burned, and captured again, till everything dissolves into the white noise of memories.