Monument as Ruin is a project completing the trinity of sites that maps the decentralization of warfare across the 20th century via early warning outposts: from WWI sound experiments, through WWII visual command bunkers, to Cold War electromagnetic radar stations. TRAILER INSTALLATION At the core of Monument as Ruin is an immersive installation called The Second Coming. Flooding the vaulted space, a custom built 12-foot parabolic cement sound system plays an original soundtrack by Colin Stetson. Built to a 1:1 scale of the original military listening posts from the 1930s, Stankievech reverse engineered the acoustics from a listening system into a projection system. The result is a dynamic installation with sound zones fluctuating throughout the museum composed of interfering acoustic waves that creates a topography for the listener to move through. Commissioned for his visceral music, Stetson creates a timewarp where prehistoric screams resonant through future ruins of an alien landscape.
The video – shot in four different countries on either side of the English Channel – documents both WWI and WWII military outposts. The final footage has been edited into a post-apocalyptic scifi film, where Nazi bunkers have become crashed spaceships and British Sound Mirrors repurposed as an intergalactic communication system. Working from the premise established by A.E Van Vogt's 1939 science fiction story "Black Destroyer" (the first scifi story that postulated the crisis of the doubled colonizer), The Second Coming provides a timeless critique of first contact –a misnomer always already in trouble.
