Filastine Frequency

I’ve tried writing this piece about the Sound Swarm in Hamburg a half dozen times. It won’t come out. It was too tremendous a labor, should have written in installments.

Summary: the Sound Swarm is a rolling loudspeaker orkestra, a loose choreography of bicycles whose together form a distributed mobile sound system to be used for direct action interventions or just ripping a whole in the fabric of everyday life.

Aggregated into sub-swarms according to our tools: ants with megaphones hats, birds with home-made resonant 5-gallon bucket speaker systems, fish with a collection of 80′s boomboxes, and bees with megaphones mounted on tall crutches. Each of these groups was fed a distinct audio channel via four fm transmitters mounted on the queen bee, a type of chariot built from two tall bikes with a cockpit in the center for the sound controller. The queen is armed with so many batteries, cables, gadgets, and antennas that it looked more lunar landing craft than anything for use on this planet. One of the festival curators called it “something from the next century”. We can only hope she is right, that the art of the future will be made from junk, powered by human sweat, and defy the law.

Being in the cockpit had to qualify as one of my personal favorite “performance” experiences, as we rolled off curbs, over cobblestones, through grass, dodging police, sometimes cowering under a plastic sheet during brief rain showers, while controlling five-channels of sound spread across thirty moving speakers in a chaotic mass of hundreds of bicycles pouring through the dark streets of an unfamiliar city.

Like any worthwhile performance, the police department provides the last act with a siren-lights-as-disco-party crescendo. Have a look at this newspaper piece. Later there will be some video of the performance/action. Until then these stills of the preparation.

I give up on trying to describe this more, just want to say thanks to Kampnagel for being a festival willing to take risks, and to this iteration of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination for being a team solid enough to realize such an idea.

The vacation from being Filastine is about to come to an end. What have I been doing this last month? Mostly looking for an apartment, nothing could be more mundane and un-blogworthy. It’s been a month nearly free of generating anything, leaving time to indulge in the hedonistic pleasure of being a culture consumer. A rare opportunity to read, watch movies, and listen to music than it is to write, edit video, and compose audio. Also more time for local adventures.

I went walking with friends in Cap de Creu where we found some lost hunting dogs, after managing to reunite them with the owner we were invited to their lodge. It was exactly as you’d expect a rural spanish hunting lodge. A long rustic room with a burning hearth consuming half of one entire wall, animal heads, boar tusks, and antler mounted on every vertical surface, bearded men playing cards while smoking and drinking. Hunters are obliged to wear read when in the field, so they were all clothed head to toe in red, with a few fresh animal corpses laying around, well, it was just fucking weird.

I finally explored the water mines of Can Mas Deu, the sprawling eco-squat in the hills above Barcelona. The building dates from the 14th century, but the mines could be older. They consist of narrow tunnels that shoot horizontally into the hill, barely big enough for a human body to squeeze through. Groundwater collects in the tunnel then flows towards the building. Deepest inside, past many strange insects and some calf-deep water pools is a round vertical shaft, basically it’s like being at the bottom of a well, but sealed on the top, and raining underground. Here it was possible to shimmy up the sides ascend to another level of horizontal shafts. It’s a good place for the antisocial.

Urban Barcelona has begun to reveal her charms again, with the return of The Influencers. This year featuring a delegation from New York’s Black Label Bike club, which was a good excuse to trot out the sound swarm equipment. See video.

The big surprise of this year’s festival was definitely James Acord. He’s spent the better part of his 75 years working to make art that includes nuclear material. It’s a story almost too incredible for re-telling.

After the presentation he was told me that, although now he is now marginally surviving via art sales, for many years he worked night shift stacking tater-tots for a burger chain. I consider myself lucky to have escaped so young from the cum cleanup, animal corpse disposal, and taxi driving jobs that have kept me afloat until I moved to europe.

The last post I made here was in the middle of a police raid of the Bike Bloc’s production site, The Candy Factory, sorry for not updating sooner. It’s been impossible.

Disappointed at not finding some bombs or grappling hooks, the police seized one of the double tall bike chariots, inventing a new danish word that translates as “war bike” to describe it as a weapon. They also took some computers & other items. They didn’t find my laptop because it was hidden under a trick seat (pretty sneaky, no?). Lucky we were behind schedule building the Sound Swarm, or they would have invented a danish word for “terror sound bike” as a pretext for sequestering them.

It was late in the evening when they let us re-enter. We went into the overdrive to get our shit done, stumbling around until four in the morning- cutting, wiring, welding in that totally inefficient way that you work when exhausted. Then it was time to pull my computer out of it’s hiding place and deal with the audio rendering & loading the MP3 players, this took until 7:30am, complicated by the constant power failures that would plunge the buildings into darkness.

It was more than a bit creepy being alone editing audio in an big building in total darkness, bundled up in a a puffy survival suit, my exhales creating great plumes of fog, constantly removing the headphones and looking out the windows to make the police weren’t about to burst in again. At 8am I left for our rendezvous in full white-out blizzard conditions.

Then began one of the hardest feats of endurance I’ve personally experienced. Pulling a heavy steel trailer of loudspeakers across Copenhagen, on a crappy discarded 1-speed bike, after a night without sleep, with neither breakfast nor dinner the night before, in a motherfucking blizzard, while we were stopped multiple times by van-loads of riot police to be searched and harassed en route. It was equal parts torture and bliss, as some combination of the snowstorm, the paranoia, physical exertion, and sleeplessness brought on a personal serenity I’ve rarely known.

Many things happened this day, I’ll describe just one. Faced with no other option to arrive at the site of the COP15 (official name of the Climate Summit), the Sound Swarm turned our speakers up to 11 and invaded a highway in a kamikaze mission directly towards our goal. The traffic came to an abrupt snarl behind us and a pair of motorcycle cops came out of nowhere to make a thin blockade. The gap between the concrete divider and the motorcycle was too small, my sound trailer was ripped off and capsized into the roadway.

We were barely free of this first blockade when some riot vans drove at us head-on, disgorging police. It was all slow motion, a lot like being in a car accident. It was also comedic, we were the protagonists of one of those early video games where the player must navigate through an obstacle course filled with zombies. but instead of an 8-bit theme song, we had distorted megaphones. I collided with one of the zombies, uh, I mean police, and was tackled to the ground. Only 2 lives left! and somehow we did get away. 

From my narrow perspective the week felt like a fusion of Burning Man, the iditarod (or at least the Idiotarad), and the Seattle WTO. I’ve learned some personal lessons on this trip as well. First: duct tape doesn’t function below freezing, nor do cheap MP3 players, nor do my fingers. Second: never, never, never trust a COP.

In Copenhagen we witnessed the world’s biggest ever collective failure, a failure that demonstrated the obsolescence of the nation-state and our precious economic systems. We also witnessed the birth of a new movement. I went to Copenhagen to do whatever I am physically capable to change the outcomes of this summit, so did about a hundred thousand other people. We were pissed off before the Summit. Now we are livid.

This is the uber-issue, the biggest problem that humanity has ever confronted, it’s bigger than nations, bigger than wars, bigger than AIDS, bigger than the black plague, bigger than capitalism vs socialism, and definitely bigger than those worthless corporations that were all “too big to fail.”  Either we keep this planet inhabitable, or is it game over for us & what’s left of earth’s biodiversity. Skeptical? Have a look at some climate models

What does it take to change the way humanity wrecks this planet? Everything. There should be no technique in the toolbox that is off-limits: hunger strikes, green investing, kidnapping, lifestyle changes, petitions, education, art & media, insurrection. If you’ve got a skill than bring it.

We’ve also got to recognize that the burden of responsibility falls on us, that small fraction of the earth’s population that has a plenty to eat, is literate, has a computer, some free time, and some minimum of civil rights. The other 90% are too busy trying to survive. Bad news reader, if you are looking at this or any other blog you are probably disqualified from inaction.

foto: Sound Swarm hatching a plot while hiding in some bushes