In July 2009, the Glass Bees performed at Monkeytown, a remarkable and sorely missed cube of a space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that was outfitted with a good sound system and four large video screens. For several years, it was home to Eyewash, a monthly event series that paired video artists with musicians and sound artists to create live audiovisual experiences.
For this show I prepared three two-channel video projections that Jason Das, Andrea Williams, and I accompanied on improvised guitar, cello, field recordings, electronics, and other sounds. The images below are some split screen stills that I created before the performance to show Jason and Andrea how the images would work together.
Jason and I shot the video on which these stills are based on a brutally cold winter day in early 2009 in and around Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, NJ. A militarily strategic area all the way back to the early days of the country, the northern reaches of Sandy Hook are still inhabited by the remains of 19th-century bunkers and mortar batteries, as well as a few remnants of the Nike missile facility designed in the 1950s to protect New York City from a nuclear attack. None of these military facilities was ever called upon to resist an actual invasion, and they’ve been left largely to crumble.
