Blackbird (Rocket Mysticism)
"'Invincible Germany' means a Germany that is Invincible!"
~Raja Emanuel SchiffgensFlight Plan Satellite Objects Charles Stankievech with Haseeb Ahmed
Teufelsberg, Berlin, Germany
Original Performance August 10, 2009.
Relaunch August 21, 2009.Play 2min extract of performance
[full track length 7:44] :
Blackbird (Rocket Mysticism) is part of a series of collaborative rocket launches embedded in spectacle performances. Launch sites are chosen according to historical moments as well as fictional anecdotes of military development, including Cape Canaveral, Florida; Peenemünde, Usedom Island, Germany; NYC, New York; Pasadena, California; Tuktoyuktuk, Canada; and the Teufelsberg Towers, Berlin.
Teufelsberg (Devil’s mountain) became the ideal node to connect the line of rocket launches—from Cape Canaveral, Florida to Peenemünde, Germany—with Stankievech’s line of previous military research encapsulated in The DEW Project (www.stankievech.net/projects/DEW). While it is well known that the V2 rocket was developed in Peenemünde during the WW2 by the Nazis, in 1930 Berlin became the location for the first military rocket test site (a few kilometers away from Teufelsberg where the Tegel airport is today).
For Blackbird , a flyable, model V2 rocket was built to be launched inside the main geodesic radome at the abandoned US Intelligence Station of Teufelsberg, West Berlin. Using custom software, rock’n roll amplifier and microphones, the rocket launch was recorded as part of a live electroacoustic performance. Using only the source sound of the rocket ignition and the acoustic properties of the resonant geodesic radome, the spark of white noise from the rocket morphed in realtime into meditative droning tones sculpted by the architecture. With paranoid references, linking Nazi prototyping, American utopian architecture, minimalist sound art from the 1970s, the Cold War Space Race, Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), and Pynchonian theories, Blackbird generates a surrealist supernova—much like the press conference where David Lynch and associates announced they bought Teufelsberg as the site for the new Transcendental Meditation University with the ambition to make “an Invincible Germany.” A volatile history, ranging from an underground Nazi technical college to a future campus to make Germany invincible through yogic flying, Rocket Mysticism trips on the boundary between formalist/spiritualist intentions vs. political/aesthetic ambitions.
Haseeb Ahmed was approached as a collaborator in the Teufelsberg launch due to his work exploring the overlap of ideology, architecture and technology. (http://www.haseebahmed.com/)
