New Yorks East Side-Subwaybagger
Die Metropolitan Transportation Authority von New York hat eine Reihe CC-lizensierter Bilder der Bauarbeiten unter dem Grand Central Terminal auf Flickr online gestellt, ein paar mehr und andere Bilder gibt’s beim Atlantic: The Tunnels of NYC’s East Side Access Project. Ihr wisst schon, Höhlen, gigantische Bohrer und Riesenbagger.
A huge public works project is currently under construction in New York City, connecting Long Island to Manhattan’s East Side. Deep underground, rail tunnels are extending from Sunnyside, Queens, to a new Long Island Rail Road terminal being excavated beneath Grand Central Terminal. Construction began in 2007, with an estimated cost of $6.3 billion and completion date of 2013. Since then, the cost estimate has been raised to $8.4 billion, and the completion date moved back to 2019. When finished, the line will accommodate 24 trains per hour at peak traffic, cutting down on commute times from Long Island, and opening up access to John F. Kennedy International Airport from Manhattan’s East Side. Collected here are images of the progress to date, deep beneath Queens and Manhattan.
Flickr: East Side Access Update – 2/12/2013 (via Interweb3000)
Atlantic: The Tunnels of NYC’s East Side Access Project
Underground-Arthackers from Paris
Wired hat einen extrem spannenden Artikel über UX (Urban eXperiment), ein Künstlerkollektiv, die in jahrelangen Aktionen alte Kunstwerke restaurieren, die Uhr des Panthéon restaurieren oder Kinos unter dem Trocadéro bauen und dazu das jahrhunderte alte System aus Tunneln und Katakomben unter der Stadt nutzen. Underground-Art-Hacking in Kunstraub-Ästhetik, oder so ähnlich. Toll!
UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.
What has made much of this work possible is UX’s mastery, established 30 years ago and refined since, of the city’s network of underground passageways—hundreds of miles of interconnected telecom, electricity, and water tunnels, sewers, catacombs, subways, and centuries-old quarries. Like computer hackers who crack digital networks and surreptitiously take control of key machines, members of UX carry out clandestine missions throughout Paris’ supposedly secure underground tunnels and rooms. The group routinely uses the tunnels to access restoration sites and stage film festivals, for example, in the disused basements of government buildings.
UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.
The Underbelly Underground-Streetartshow comes to Paris
Vor einem Jahr hatte ich was zum Underbelly-Project, einer Underground-Streetartshow in einer verlassenen U-Bahn-Station, die nirgends angekündigt wurde und sich nur durch Mund-zu-Mund-Propaganda verbreitete… bis die New York Times davon Wind bekam. Das schöne: Deshalb sind sie nicht an die Öffentlichkeit gegangen, stellen nun aber auf der Art Basel in Miami aus und haben eine Underground-Show in Paris auf die Beine gestellt. Unter den Künstlern für die Ausstellung in Miami sind Dutzende, die ich bereits hier auf NC hatte, hier nur ein paar: TrustoCorp, Revok, Ron English (Bild oben), Jeff Soto, Anthony Lister, Meggs, The London Police, Dan Witz, Swoon.
Zum Underbelly in Paris hat die Huffington Post einen ziemlich langen Artikel über das komplette Projekt inklusive Interviews:
Taking place over just 24 hours instead of 18 months, and featuring around 10 mainly European artists instead of more than 100, it was a quicker and more intense process.
“The execution of the project took less than 24 hours, yet the logistical planning took months. 10 artists, three organisers, two photographers and one writer from five countries descended on Paris for a few days to take part,” said Workhorse, one of the curators of the NYC and Paris shows, in a statement about the project.
As for location all we can reveal is that it’s somewhere beneath Paris, involves a long walk and possibly a climb.
“The drab grey subway shell quickly took shape, artists working side by side in near darkness, applying their creative vision to the surfaces of the abandoned hull,” Workhorse described.
“The consistent hiss of spray paint was the backdrop of the project, a shuffling of feet and murmuring of voices that broke the silence. In less than 24 hours the walls were covered and we emerged above ground. The entrance was closed and as quickly as we arrived, we left to fly back to our respective homes.”
HuffPo: Underbelly Paris: How To Bury An Art Gallery – And Get Away With It
Vandalog: Underbelly resurfaces: The Underbelly Show, Preview of The Underbelly Show (and NEW LOCATION)
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
The Underbelly Project: Graffiti-Artshow in an abandoned Subway-Station
Underground LSD-Lab in a Missile-Silo. And a Goth-Stripper.
(Vice Direktlsd, via Reddit)
Vice hat die ziemlich weirde Story von Leonard Pickard, Gordon Todd Skinner, der ehemaligen Stripperin Krystle Cole und ihrer Zeit in einem Underground-LSD-Labor in einem ehemaligen Raketensilo. Und ich bin mir supersicher, dass ich die Story hier schonmal hatte, aber ich glaube, das Video dazu ist neu. Naja, und solche Geschichten bringe ich aus ein paar Gründen natürlich gerne nochmal.
What is known is that in 1997, a virtuosic organic chemist named Leonard Pickard joined forces with Gordon Todd Skinner, the heir to a spring-manufacturing fortune, to organize what would later become the world’s most productive LSD laboratory. A laboratory that, according to some sources, produced 90 percent of the LSD in circulation, in addition to unknown quantities of MDMA, ALD-52, ergot wine, and quite possibly LSZ… but I’ll get to that later.
Leonard Pickard is an anomaly among clandestine chemists—one of very few who was able to achieve great success in academia. He studied at Harvard, Purdue, and UCLA while producing kilos of MDA and LSD in secret laboratories under the auspices of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. He was charismatic and gentlemanly, with excellent posture (he would advise slouchers to let their vertebrae fall vertically, like “a beautiful string of pearls”). A notable photo depicts Leonard at a scientific conference in Sussex, gently appreciating the scent of a long-stemmed rose. He was like that.
Gordon Todd Skinner (known by friends as Todd) is an autodidact chemist of uncertain ability; indeed, whether he is a chemist at all is subject to debate. He allegedly performed his first mescaline extraction from L. williamsii at the age of 19. By 25, he was incarcerated and facing life in a New Jersey prison for trafficking 42 pounds of marijuana. In order to beat the charges, he began a long and fruitful career as a government informant. In 1996, he purchased a decommissioned Atlas E nuclear-missile silo in Wamego, Kansas, and transformed it into a subterranean psychedelic palace. Three years later, he purchased a second silo to house an LSD superlab. The laboratory, however, only operated for a short time, and by October 2000 Todd was providing DEA agents with a guided tour of the premises. Simply dismissing Todd as a snitch would ignore the fact that he seemed to possess a deep and honest commitment to the distribution of psychedelic drugs for the betterment of mankind, which makes what he did all the more complex.
Lastly, there is Krystle Cole, a former goth stripper from Kansas, who fell in love with Todd and was ushered into his private circle of chemists and dealers. Krystle met Todd in February 2000, and they shared six months of lysergic bliss in the silo before things began to catabolize into chaos. By August 2000, Todd was afraid the LSD laboratory was under government surveillance and decided to preempt any criminal charges he might face by turning in Leonard. He furtively began recording conversations and compiling evidence. This led to Leonard’s arrest, and a nationwide (and possibly global) LSD drought that lasted throughout the early 2000s.
The strange Tunnels of Bavaria
Schöner Artikel auf spOnline-International, der am Wochenende an mir vorbeiging, über uralte, hunderte sogar tausend Jahre alte Tunnelsysteme unter Bayern und Österreich, in denen der Legende nach Erdgeister gehaust haben sollen.
At least 700 of these chambers have been found in Bavaria alone, along with about 500 in Austria. In the local vernacular, they have fanciful names such as “Schrazelloch” (“goblin hole”) or “Alraunenhöhle” (“mandrake cave”). They were supposedly built by elves, and legend has it that gnomes lived inside. According to some sagas, they were parts of long escape tunnels from castles.
In reality, the tunnels are often only 20 to 50 meters long. The larger passageways are big enough so that people can walk through them in a hunched position, but some tunnels are so small that explorers have to get down on all fours. The tiniest passageways, known as “Schlupfe” (“slips”), are barely 40 centimeters (16 inches) in diameter.
The ground beneath the southern German state of Bavaria is literally perforated with these underground mazes — and no one knows why.
Hideouts or Sacred Spaces? – Experts Baffled by Mysterious Underground Chambers, hier auf deutsch: Archäologie – Irrgärten der Unterwelt (via Boing Boing)
Crack the Surface: Urban Exploration-Documentary from London
(Vimeo Direktsurface, via Martin)
Tolle erste Folge einer Doku-Serie vom englischen Urban Exploration-Blog SilentUK.
Fire and Graffiti in Paris’ Underground
National Geographic hat einen schönen Artikel inklusive Bildstrecke über die Katakomben von Paris, die voller dunkler Gänge, Knochen, Gold, Clubs, Feuerspucker und Graffiti sind: Under Paris – Getting There: It involves manholes and endless ladders, What to Wear: Miner’s helmets are good, What to do: Work, party, paint—or just explore the dark web of tunnels. Ich hatte da vor knapp zwei Jahren schonmal was drüber: Feuerspucker und Graffiti in den Katakomben von Paris.
A man in blue coveralls is emerging from a hole in the sidewalk. His hair falls in dreadlocks, and there is a lamp on his head. Now a young woman emerges, holding a lantern. She has long, slender legs and wears very short shorts. Both wear rubber boots, both are smeared with beige mud, like a tribal decoration. The man shoves the iron cover back over the hole and takes the woman’s hand, and together they run grinning down the street.
Paris has a deeper and stranger connection to its underground than almost any city, and that underground is one of the richest. The arteries and intestines of Paris, the hundreds of miles of tunnels that make up some of the oldest and densest subway and sewer networks in the world, are just the start of it. Under Paris there are spaces of all kinds: canals and reservoirs, crypts and bank vaults, wine cellars transformed into nightclubs and galleries. Most surprising of all are the carrières—the old limestone quarries that fan out in a deep and intricate web under many neighborhoods, mostly in the southern part of the metropolis.
Under Paris – Getting There: It involves manholes and endless ladders, What to Wear: Miner’s helmets are good, What to do: Work, party, paint—or just explore the dark web of tunnels (Bild oben: Zoriah Miller)
NYC Underground Exploration
(Vimeo Direktexplore, via MeFi)
Tolles Video von Andrew Wonder über Urban Explorer Steve Duncan von Undercity, der Führungen durch die Kanäle und U-Bahn-Schächte von New York anbietet und zwar nicht für ein paar Stunden, sondern er geht da gleich fünf Tage lang runter und schläft da auch. In der NYTimes steht ein langer, toller Artikel darüber:
It must have been the third or fourth day — time, by that point, had started to dissolve — when I stood in camping gear on Fifth Avenue, waiting as my companions went to purchase waterproof waders at the Orvis store. We had already hiked through sewers in the Bronx, slept in a basement boiler room, passed a dusty evening in a train tunnel; we were soiled and sleep-deprived, and we smelled of rotting socks. Yet no one on that sidewalk seemed to notice. As I stood among the businessmen and fashionable women, it dawned on me that New Yorkers — an ostensibly perceptive lot — sometimes see only what’s directly in front of their eyes.
I suppose that’s not a bad way to think about the urban expedition we were on: a taxing, baffling, five-day journey into New York’s underground, the purpose of which, its planners said, was to expose the city’s skeleton, to render visible its invisible marvels. The trip’s conceiver, Erling Kagge, a 47-year-old Norwegian adventurer, had ascended Mount Everest and trekked on foot to both the North and South poles. His partner, Steve Duncan, a 32-year-old student of public history, had logged more than a decade exploring subways, sewers and storm drains. Last month, the two of them forged a new frontier: an extended exploration of the subterranean city, during which they lived inside the subsurface infrastructure, sleeping on the trail, as it were.
The Wilderness Below Your Feet, hier die zum Artikel gehörende Galerie, hier ein NPR-Podcast: Into The Tunnels: Exploring The Underside Of NYC
Michael Wolfs Tokyo Compression
Schönes Fotoprojekt von Michael Wolf: In der U-Bahn in Tokyo fotografiert er Leute, deren Gesichter gegen die Scheiben gedrückt werden. Unbedingt auch den Rest seines Portfolios durchklicken. (via Coudal)
The Realist: Underground Satire-Mag aus den 60s online!
Ethan Persoff, wohl am ehesten bekannt für die Comics with Problems, hostet seit letzter Woche auf seiner Website das komplette Archiv von „The Realist“, einem Underground Satire-Magazin, das von Ende der 50er bis Mitte der 70er von Paul Krassner herausgegeben wurde und dann nochmal von den 80ern bis 2001 lief. Die erste Ausgabe wurde übrigens in den Büros des MAD Mags produziert.
Von Wikipedia:
The Realist, edited and published by Paul Krassner, was a pioneering magazine of “social-political-religious criticism and satire” in the American countercultural press of the mid-20th century. Although The Realist is often regarded as a major milestone in the underground press, it was a nationally-distributed newsstand publication as early as 1959. Publication was discontinued in 2001. The Realist was the first satirical magazine to publish conspiracy theories.
First published in the spring of 1958 in New York City in the offices of Mad, The Realist appeared on a fairly regular schedule during the 1960s and then on an irregular schedule after the early 1970s. It was revived as a much smaller newsletter during the mid-1980s when material from the magazine was collected in The Best of the Realist: The 60′s Most Outrageously Irreverent Magazine (Running Press, 1985). The final issue of The Realist was #146 (Spring 2001).
The Realist provided a format for extreme satire in its articles, cartoons, and Krassner’s editorials, but it also carried more traditionally serious material in articles and interviews.
Das Ding ist eine reine Schatzkiste, hier ein paar der Artikel, die mir auf den ersten Blick ins Auge gefallen sind: My Acid Trip with Groucho Marx, An impolite Interview with an Abortionist (1962!), The Birth Control Pill, Timothy Leary and his psychological H-Bomb, Woody Allen and his impolite Interview oder hier das relativ bekannte Disneyland Orgy Poster.
The Underbelly Project: Graffiti-Artshow in an abandoned Subway-Station
Seit Anfang 2009 bastelt Streetartist PAC an einer Ausstellung in einer verlassenen U-Bahn-Station in New York. Das Ding war bis gestern supergeheim und, naja, superundergound eben. Das Ding war so dermaßen unbekannt, dass PAC sogar ausflippte, als Martha Cooper herself (die Dame ist legendäre Graffiti-Fotografin und hat das ebenso legendäre Buch „Subway Art“ mitgeschrieben) um eine Einladung bat.
Von Just:
[Die] vier Stockwerke unter den Strassen NYs gelegene Station war noch in keiner Karte anderer Explorer verzeichnet, kein Graffiti an den Waeden und keine frischen Fussspuren im Staub. „PAC“ zeigte den Spot einem Freund und zusammen entschieden sie in der Station eine riesen Urban-Art- Streetart-Galerie zu organisieren. Im laufe der letzten Jahre luden sie einzelne Artists ein um in der Station zu malen, zu plakatieren oder Bilder aufzuhaengen.
Es gab damals noch nen riesen Aerger weil ich Martha Cooper von der Geschichte erzaehlte, die“PAC“ auch kannte und ihm gleich mal ne Mail schickte um zu versuchen uns einzuladen. Zurueck kam ein Sturm an Fragen und Zorn, woher wir von der Station wuessten und wer noch davon weiss. Das Projekt war die letzten Jahre sicher das best gehütetste Geheimniss von NYC.
Gestern nun haben die Künstler und PAC einen Reporter der New York Times in die Galerie eingeladen und seit dem ist das Ding in aller Munde.
It is one of the largest shows of such pieces ever mounted in one place, and many of the contributors are significant figures in both the street-art world and the commercial trade that now revolves around it. Its debut might have been expected to draw critics, art dealers and auction-house representatives, not to mention hordes of young fans. But none of them were invited. […]
Known to its creators and participating artists as the Underbelly Project, the space, where all the show’s artworks remain, defies every norm of the gallery scene. Collectors can’t buy the art. The public can’t see it. And the only people with a chance of stumbling across it are the urban explorers who prowl the city’s hidden infrastructure or employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
That’s because the exhibition has been mounted, illegally, in a long-abandoned subway station. The dank, cavernous hall feels a lot farther than it actually is from the bright white rooms of Chelsea’s gallery district. Which is more or less the point: This is an art exhibition that goes to extremes to avoid being part of the art world, and even the world in general.
Ich kann solches Über-Underground-Getue ja verstehen und halte es für halb-bewundernswert, aber auch für halb-beknackt. Kunst und Kultur will gesehen werden und sie vor den Augen von Menschen zu verstecken, die sie unter Umständen nicht verstehen würden, ist nicht grade wenig elitär und snobistisch. Andererseits ist die Haltung hier besonders gut nachvollziehbar, ist das doch alles immer noch illegal und ganz im Sinne von Vandalism. Also: Toll!
Hier die Story in der New York Times: Street Art Way Below the Street, hier ihre Slideshow und ein Video dazu, die Website zum Projekt befindet sich noch im Aufbau, hier eine Story dazu in der London Times: The greatest show unearthed: „In an abandoned station under New York City, the most exclusive gallery in the world stands as a protest against the commercialisation of street art“, Robotswillkill hat noch mehr Fotos aus vom Underbelly Project, nach dem Klick noch das Video der NYT (Autostart-Warnung). (via Urban Artcore, Laughing Squid)
Neutrino Observatorium als Kunst-Installation
Bilder des japanischen Neutrino Observatoriums Super-Kamiokande (Super K) sind so alt wie das Internet und die hat jeder schonmal gesehen (falls nicht: hier). Das Super-K besteht „aus einem Tank, der mit 50.000 Tonnen hochreinem Wasser gefüllt ist. In diesem Tank befinden sich 11.200 Photomultiplier, welche die Tscherenkow-Strahlung von freien Elektronen und Myonen registrieren, die durch Wechselwirkung der Neutrinos mit den Wassermolekülen entstehen. Die Anlage befindet sich etwa 1 km unter der Erdoberfläche, um die kosmische Strahlung abzuschirmen.“ (Wikipedia)
Und als wäre das nicht schon abgefahren genug, eat this: „The photomultiplier tubes register the amount of light created when a neutrino meets an electron of ultra-pure water. The encounter is marked by a real Sonic Boom, an explosion faster than the speed of the light. On the computer screens of scientists who study the phenomenon, a sonic boom looks like a ring of blue light that travel to the surface.“
Genau das Ding hat die Künstlerin Nelly Ben Hayoun nun in London in einem unterirdischen Club unter der Tower Bridge nachgebaut. Das hier, liebe Kinder, ist komplett und unfassbar großartig.
With 50,000 tonnes of super pure water and a crew of expert navigators from Imperial College London and Queen Mary University of London, Super K Sonic Booooum is a mind-blowing installation demonstrating the visual equivalent of a massive sonic boom.
A remarkable fusion of water, light and science, the installation – developed by designer Nelly Ben Hayoun – is inspired by physicists at the Super-Kamiokande (Super K) neutrino observatory in Japan, a massive subterranean scientific instrument used – amongst other things – to discover traces of exploding stars out there in the universe.
Five Imperial College London physics researchers, and seven PhD students are currently working on the T2K neutrino oscillation experiment, which uses Super K. Of these, Professor Dave Wark , Dr Yoshi Uchida and Dr Matthew Malek will be appearing in the installation, guiding curious visitors through the world of particle physics in a rubber dinghy.
SUPER K SONIC BOOOOUM, mehr Infos auf We make money not art.
Comic: The Complete Cheech Wizard von Vaughn Bodé
Das wunderbare Blog „Behind the counter comics“ (ein Ableger für Erwachsenen-Comics von meinem anderen Lieblings-Comicblog „Crosseyed Cyclops“) hat eine Gesamtausgabe der Cheech Wizard-Comics von Vaughn Bodé. Der Cheech Wizard hatte maßgeblichen Einfluß auf die Gestaltung der Characters in der Graffiti-Kultur und die Figuren von Bodé tauchten regelmäßig auf Zugen und in Pieces in den 70er und 80er Jahren auf. Snip von Wikipedia:
Characteristically, this panel features discussion on the search for God.Cheech Wizard was a cartoon character created by artist Vaughn Bodé and appearing in various works, including the National Lampoon, from 1967 until Bodé’s death in 1975. Though the character was, according to Bodé, created in 1957, Cheech didn’t see print until 1967 when he appeared in a Syracuse University pamphlet.
The Wizard wears a very large yellow wizard’s hat, with his legs, clad in what appear to be red leotards, visible underneath. His face and indeed his species has never been revealed. He speaks in an ungrammatical sort of urban dialect. He was generally accompanied by his lizard apprentice Razzberry, until that character was killed off in a well-remembered storyline.
Cheech was depicted as foul mouthed, often drunk or high, and constantly on the make. His attitude towards his fellow residents of the magic forest in which he lived (generally talking male animals and human females, the latter invariably under-dressed) was usually one of contempt. Curiously, he was referred to (often by himself) as the Cartoon Messiah, which suggested Bodé’s long-standing interest in religion. But his general reaction to anyone that annoyed him (and the list there is quite long) was to deliver a swift kick to the groin.
Londoner 60s Underground Mag „International Times“ online
Ich liebe sowas hier: Das Underground-Mag „International Times“ aus den swinging Sixties und natürlich aus London ist komplett online gestellt worden und es ist voller Farben und Hippies. Paul McCartney finanzierte das Teil und gelauncht wurde es auf einem Konzert von Pink Floyd, Beiträge für das Mag kamen u.a. von John Peel, William Burroughs oder Allen Ginsberg und die Redaktion wurde wiederholt von der Polizei durchsucht, was man mit einer Gegenaktion beantwortete, Snip von Wikipedia:
In response to yet another raid on the paper’s offices, London’s alternative press on one occasion succeeded, somewhat astonishingly, in pulling off what was billed as a “reprisal attack” on the police—prompting the Evening Standard headline Raid on the Yard. The paper Black Dwarf published a detailed floor-by-floor guide to Scotland Yard, complete with diagrams, descriptions of locks on particular doors and snippets of overheard conversation in the offices of Special Branch. The anonymous author, or “blue dwarf,” as he styled himself, described how he perused police files, and even claimed to have sampled named brands of whisky in the Commissioner’s office. A day or two later The Daily Telegraph announced that the “raid” had forced the police to withdraw and re-issue all security passes.
Die unterirdische Stadt von Derinkuyu
Rinco del Misterio hat ein fasziniertendes Posting über die unterirdische Stadt von Derinkuyu, Türkei. Die wurde als Rückzugsgebiet bei Kriegen gebuddelt und bot Platz für mehr als 10.000 Menschen.
In 1963, an inhabitant of Derinkuyu (in the region of Cappadocia, central Anatolia, Turkey), knocking down a wall of his house cave, discovered amazed that behind it was a mysterious room that he had never seen, and this led him room to another and another and another to it … By chance he had discovered the underground city of Derinkuyu, whose first level could be excavated by the Hittites around 1400 BC.
Archaeologists began to explore this fascinating underground city abandoned. It managed to forty meters deep, but is believed to have a fund of up to 85 meters. Only eight can be visited at the highest levels; others are partially blocked or restricted to archaeologists and anthropologists who study Derinkuyu.
Derinkuyu, the mysterious underground city of Turkey (via Reddit)
