Domestic Disturbances 01

Condo value improving alchemy, courtesy of Overstock.com, Home Depot, Ikea, Bed Bath and Beyond, and the Old Cass Tech High School (?)

The North Corktown Farmers Market (NCFM)

The Corktown Studios Mission Statement Reads:

"Corktown Studios is an artist collective located in Detroit’s re-emerging North Corktown Neighborhood providing affordable studios for its members as well as exhibition space for area artists and the community. Corktown Studios, in conjunction with complementary rejuvenation projects in the neighborhood (hospitality, housing, agriculture) aims to contribute to the emerging identity of the area as a diverse and accessible hub for community-oriented creatives."

Inherent here, is the suggestion that this neighborhood is without, or at least seeking to upgrade, an identity. No disrespect, of course, is intended towards the long term resident of the neighborhood whose identity image of the area is exactly ‘home’ and needs no academic analysis and prescription to affirm it as such.

Like a more subjective (and suggestive) masterplan, though, the perceived identity of a re-emerging neighborhood will, inevitably, guide development and rehabilitation, inform the character of the newer transplant demographic, and impact the adjacent communities.
The identity of North Corktown, as the CS mission statement suggests, is already reemerging as an accessible hub for community area creatives. With an ever increasing footprint of community gardens (11 in total, by last informal count) rehabilitation of multi-family residential units, the addition of the hostel, the adjacency to the student- oriented Woodbridge neighborhood and to the hip-yet-established Corktown Proper, and the opening of art-based event and studio spaces such as ours, the proper components of ‘place’ exist, albeit disconnected.

Within a broader effort to provide a signature hub for this community (a ‘main street’, a ‘branded face’) which may eventually embody, and even literally incorporate, the above mentioned characteristics of this community, we submit the North Corktown Farmers Market.

Velociplosion (A Muybridge Influenced Spatial Event) as part of Dlectricity 2012

This exercise intends to reverse engineer a mechanical phenomenon into a set of sculptural ‘frames’ across 100 feet of installation space. By constructing a series of identical objects in linear space, modifying each successive object slightly, and successively illuminating each object with a brief but powerful strobe, we may intimate Muybridge cell-motion with tangible, three dimensional objects. As subject matter a form has been selected that is both easily manipulated and commonplace to the urban vernacular- a street bicycle. This is animated stop motion mechanics in tangible space. Action as depicted in Manga. An over-sized flipbook. The continued re-analogization of digital white noise into spatial events by exploding.

Press Love:

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012121005083

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20121004/ENT01/210040309

Artifacts of Process (An Interlude)

In the midst of public art installation season we take pause to consider more minute temporary structures- those between production and result and which are unique results of process. These intermediate typologies surface from manufacturing methods based on mechanical tendencies, production workflow, and material optimizations, manifested as clusters, trees, tessellations, stacks, overlaps, negatives, etc. Ultimately these forms are destroyed or shedded to yield the targeted product, and are then recirculated back into the production- Hence, the final objects have both the memory and physical materiality of these intermediate forms which responsive of input, informative of output, but aesthetically unique from both.

  

(Above- "Lost Wax")

DDF-03:The Object

As a strategy for both expanding comprehension of this broad exercise and as a hedge to ensure completion, we first identify existing primary energetic inputs of knowledge, money, suburbanites etc into this area (which are UDM, Casino, and Slows, somewhat respectively). These arcs establish opportunities to build upon, as they literally and figuratively emit concentric radii of influence. Our existing land use patterns are identified, and clusters, in conjunction with the influence of zones as identified above, we may establish a translucent speculative layer of hospitality, education, agriculture, and commerce. Within this we may point out actual edifices to be brought to the foreground, in conjunction new complementary structures and spaces. This may give rise to a finer detail of cluster and potential foci, to which we may connect back to the original energetic area inputs.