GHOST WORLD TOUR GHOST ROCKETS is a series of rocket launch spectacles occurring at sites around the world tactically mapping the history of ballistics from the birth of military rocketry in Europe through MIT laboratories and the NASA space program to US Military bases in the desert and DARPA research stations in the Arctic. Adapting the form of a rock’n roll world tour, each site is often paired with a rock song that becomes the performance’s title and inspires a choreographed spectacle involving amplified sound on location, smoke grenades, lighting effects, and the rocket launch. The Launches are sometimes presented as a publically accessible spectacle but when at remote or high-risk security locations, a guerrilla interventionist strategy is enforced. A counterpart to Stankievech's The DEW Project (a missile defence infrastructure), Ghost Rockets engages the intertwined history of cinema and war, targeting the relationships between speed, surveillance and spectacle as much as exploring the concepts of gravity and transcedence. Each launch results in artifacts called satellite objects, ranging from scorched launch pads and ignition Zippos to crystals and silkscreened rock’n roll posters.
Many of the Launches are in collaboration with local artists.
LAUNCH TOUR SCHEDULE:
Dark Side of the Moon (A Spectral Explosion in the Key of Imipolex G) | Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA | June 7, 2009
Blackbird (Rocket Mysticism) | NSA Spy Station, Teufelsberg, Berlin, Germany | with Haseeb Ahmed | August 10+21, 2009
Rocketman | NAZI V-2 Lab, Peenemünde, Usedome Island, Baltic Sea, Germany | with Mai Hofstad Gunnes | August 11, 2009
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds | Waterpod, NYC, New York, USA | with Will Cotton + EV Day | August 16, 2009
Telstar | NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, California, USA | October 3, 2009
Space Oddity | Mojave Desert, Edwards Air Force Base, California, USA | October 3, 2009
Paranoid | HAARP US Air Force Ionospheric Research Observatory, Alaska, USA | October 9. 2009.
Purple Haze (A-side) | BAR-3 DEW Line Radar Station, Arctic Ocean, Canada | with Lance Blomgren | December 31, 2009.
Purple Haze (B-side) | BAR-3 DEW Line Radar Station, Arctic Ocean, Canada | January 30, 2010.
Sympathy for the Devil | MIT, Cambridge, Massachusettes, USA |with Haseeb Ahmed | May 17th, 2010
Ghost Rockets | Eastern Finland | June 19th, 2010
Back in the USSR (The Common Task) | Valaam Monastery, Lake Lagoda, Russia | June 21st, 2010
EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:
New Breed | Exit Gallery | NYC, NY | Feb. 25th, 2010
Répondeur | Palais de Tokyo | Paris, France | March 1- 31st, 2010
Ghost Rockets | Galerie Donald Browne | Montreal, Canada | Fall 2010
