Studio Description: "Wilderness and Sanctuary in Brownsville Brooklyn"

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The project began as a discussion of "wilderness and sanctuary" in Brownsville.  Participants assessed the meaning of traditional "wilderness" paintings such as Albert Bierstadt's "Indians Spear Fishing," at right.  Rather than a typology of "wilderness" space, the group in Brownsville repeatedly identified the social and psychological mental space of "wilding," which often centered on the concept of being "savage," in which someone would "do what it takes to survive." 

 

In this kind of mental space, or rather, perceived mental void, it is possible to become violent in order to obtain peace, but the emphasis is not on physical violence so much as on transgression of a boundary, either mental, social, or physical, often inter-personally.  Various examples were provided of being forced "up against a wall" with "nowhere to turn" where one had to "wild" and "be savage" as a means of escape. This concept of escape when there is no escape is not to flee the "problem" but to "become the problem" - a moment of radical transgression of mind and body duality with emptiness of mind in which the law and various mental issues becomes embodied by the participant. One "breaks" the law, and in this way, inscribes the law into his or her own body. 

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Within our agonistic dialectical society(1,2,3,4), it is no coincidence that this creation of law, by transgression and exception, is the primary means by which law is maintained, interpreted and changed; to "catch a case." It should come as little surprise that within a state that is majority and normatively "white," this transgression is so often embodied by "black" people in namely "minority" neighborhoods - witness to the agonistic dialectic of American culture.  The concept of embodiment of socio-cultural ecological trends within minority, particularly marginalized populations, is subject of Nancy Krieger's "ecosocial theory,"(5,6,7) as well as creative starting point for ecosocial design.  

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This is why ecosocial design is predicated on the gravity of high risk populations and spaces of vulnerability - it is within these spaces and with these actors that majority ecological systems are established, maintained, and adapted.

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The discussion on "wilding" led to a categorization of atmospheres that have various effects on wilding.  For example, a complete pharmacology of drugs and alcohol were identified in terms of their affect on social and psychological interaction. Interestingly, drugs were perceived as coming, most powerfully, from mysterious and often wild spaces, whether beyond the walls of a chemical factory, or in a foreign country ravaged by war.  

 

Music, particularly hip hop music, was identified as analogous to powerful drugs, and likewise arises from a potentially violent and wild space. Yet, hip hop is a kind of drug that can be harvested by people in the neighborhood in their own lives, and then distilled locally, in their own minds, before being bottled in the recording studio.   Music is a powerful sanctuary, place of healing, and environment of potential wilding.

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Rather than focus on the bottling and distribution of music, as a recording studio, the group decided to focus instead on the process of creation of music in "freestyle cipher" that allows for a deep analysis, a kind of "close reading" of a place, together with a group of people.   In this way, it's possible to understand real time rhythms associated with space - to understand its socio-spatial ecology - and act on it.   The main precedent for this spatial understanding of "urban rhythms" is the previous studios in Brownsville on this subject, most notably the mapping studio conducted in 2015 in which high risk young people mapped neighborhood risk over time.

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This became the basis of the "New Kind of Hospital Room" that would function as both as space of "wilderness and sanctuary" and allow for the management of ecological big data by working with the high risk group.   In this way the "new kind of hospital room" moves the data parsing techniques of cipher cryptography into the highly actionable hospital environment.  

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