This work is a site-specific ode in consideration of the Museum of Moving Image’s military history in response to the military personnel that were affected at the site by the films which were used to experiment on them through mind control tactics prior to the opening of the museum. The work centers crypt time, or an understanding of time as inherently relative to disability theories of slowing down and speeding up time and by association the effects of time-based media. The work considers the labor at the center of passive viewership and the acceleration of an imaginary that is denied radicalization. The space is centered around a rest economy which subverts the military industrial gaze by invoking a mindful activation of the public participants engagement with activism. Taking into account the architecture of the space I want to refashion the Digital Learning Suite or The Fox Amphitheatre into two rooms. In one room I would create a 360-degree space which houses a speculative audio-visual piece with a wheelchair accessible radical nap space meant for viewership at its center. Both rooms would be converted by replacing the curtains with upcycled white spandex from FabScrap a commercial waste textile fabric site. In the audio-visual room, I would project a film that would ask the public participants to invoke a no space in which they are inculcated into a reflexive mode of contemplation and action about the climate crisis and war in the Middle East. In the second room called: speak the public participants would become makers archiving their ephemeral responses to the audio-visual piece.  

The public participants are guided on an audio-visual journey that is structured as a poetic fable meditation. They access this contemplative mode through an engagement with animal consciousness and the dream world. At the center of this meditation is the reality that animals dream. And the breakdown of a meme which has surfaced recently of a Kangaroo gratefully hugging a woman who saved them from the fires in Australia. The fable asks: why be a kangaroo hugging a human when you could be beyond human as an animal, as a kangaroo hugging a kangaroo. In a land which is nowhere and everywhere at once, mislabeled as Iran. Where the body of the Kangaroo is as small as a microbe and beyond language in grandeur. We visit sign language stories by Koko and Michael from Jane Goodall’s case studies. The Gorillas describe their dreams of fantastic lands and of seeing their families poached in sign. We sit with the dead and mourn them.

Then the Kangaroos and their friends enter the fabric of Islamic architecture and begin to consider the recent war crimes case in the Hauge against the U.S. by Iran. Asking: could this be the beginning of a much larger war tribunal which addresses the genocide of war in the middle east all together? While the audience and the surrounding nature asks rhetorically how oil and fire are at the core of global catastrophe. Realizing that genocide is a phenomenon of globalization whether through war or through climate disaster within an interspecies context and space for care. The intention of the work is to invoke a sense of mourning while tapping into radical joy. How can we be hopeful about these overwhelming circumstances which live in our bodies and in everyday objects? Feelings which have caught up with a Western world that otherwise lived detached from the harmful realities we complacently participate in, as if members of a colonizing regime.

Often, we find ourselves surrounded by these events until they infiltrate our subconscious and we have nowhere to go with our feelings. Many people feel helpless in this age in which protest seems to be having a transitional revelation. As if the age of technology has brought us to a new era of organizing, but how do we organize? How do we access the paradox of accelerated capitalism and healing without becoming commodities? Beyond Brechtian terms I am interested not only in waking up the audience by breaking the fourth wall but in moving the audience to direct action through an engagement with the psychological by incubating them.

They have the choice to take a nap in the first room which houses the audio-visual projection (see model), or to enter the second room. The meditation asks: What world do You want to see? What worlds do you dream? How is time reasoning with our subconscious in a plea towards a brighter future? How would you build a better world? What is Justice to you? Who are you angry at, what are you sad about? What gives you ultimate exciting Joy? Who are You in all of this?

After leaving the guided spectacle of the first sphere room the public participants are invited into the second sphere room called: speak.  Here they access a kind of decentralized creativity. The room is meant for archiving as a decolonizing act of protest. There will be a round table with a sculpture in the center of it. This sculpture is made from images gathered in Maya during the building of the model for the first room. Around the sculpture on the round table called processing roundtable there will be seven laptops, provided on loan by School for Poetic Computation or by the residency. At six of the computers there will be a set up in which public participants can write letters. The letters include for example: free write, letter to my mother, letter to the family I never had, letter to the corporate oligarchy, letter to god/ahura mazda etc., manifesto, letter to my inner child, letter to a kangaroo, letter to Nature. The seventh computer will be a video editing station with footage from my personal archive to be edited by visiting video artists, film makers, and students.

There will also be a Persian lounge area with carpets and pillows borrowed from Nasiri Carpets. I will hand make the three sphere pillows with upcycled fabric (seen in the mockup). People can lounge here, nap here, or record themselves speaking. There will be a few available lavaliere recorders participants can carry around with them while speaking to themselves. Each recorder will have an intro meditation which participants can choose to listen to or not. The meditation will ask questions about intimacy, the dream world, and their vision of the world they want to live in, whether practical, ephemeral, or logistic. To one side there will also be two rolls of white butcher paper and large craypas and acrylic crayons, provided by Material for the Arts. Once they leave the meditation audio visual room participants can draw huge pictures to be pinned up high on the walls of the second room. See mock-up image.

These works will be housed on a website archive built by my collaborator Evan Piro. The archive will be accessible to those who have participated in the work. And can be acquired by the museum for public use. Participants will have the option to make their contribution public or to keep it in their personal folder for later access. Speak is a space to release the emotions and entanglements which usually prevent the kind of forward movement repressive tendencies of the corporate state of accelerated capitalism codify. It creates space for a re-rendering of the dominant narrative into new intricate tentacles for this eco system of activism to spark in our imaginations and our community building through architectural social space through the utterance of language, sound, and image.