Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

The methods for documenting a thinktank should be carefully considered. Doing "that

funny thing" again for the camera really screws things up. "In our first thinktank, we overextended. We spent the first week doing everything twice so we could get good pictures. Finally, we realized we were missing out on the experience so we could have photos to look at. For the second week, we scrapped the burdensome documentation in hopes that memory would serve. It does."-unpublished refections on Safety Bike Thinktank, iggS

A thinktank both produces works of art and is itself a work of art rendered as movement

through and alteration of every kind of space. "It's hard to locate the borders of this project. Fuller and I have been tied together with an invisible rope for eight days now. He tastes the Food Not Bombs spaghetti and I say "needs salt." We are desperate to get this show finaioning; our intensity leaves traces on carpets and sidewalks. Perched on a park bench outside the third venue, we grapple with last minute decisions. I see my anxiety expressed on the faces of innocent passersby. Everywhere we go there is a vortex. Everywhere we go it rains."-Symposium of Very New Music tour, 2000

A thinktank is the ache of a new world; as powerful as it may become on the inside, it is vijlnerable to things outside. Like the most epic dream, it can be chased beyond memory by a single crack of light from under the door. Take steps to isolate your group: go somewhere else, find a neutral territory, bar the door, rip the phone off the wall. Checking email is out of the question.

"After two weeks, we five were almost one thing. I didn't even notice it, actually, until we got out. It felt awfid to travel in separate vehicles. That conneaion was deep. There were these incredible synchronicities, especially on stage . . . I'm thinking of one amazing moment where we had built up to a huge, loud, messy percussion climax and without any warning we all stopped on a razor's edge ... I remember opening my eyes in this round silence before people remembered to clap."'from Auto Revision interview, 2001, in Cho Family 'zine

A thinktank is a visitor, a simultaneous but separate occurrence. When a thinktank is over, it is impossible to go back. As for your pre-thinktank life, leave a forvi^arding address?^you'll never get back home. "It was like I got used to a zero gravity situation; when I got out of that building, all of a sudden I weighed a hundred and thirty pounds again. For a few days I could hardly move. Plus my eyes ached so badfi-om the light.. ."-excerpted fiom a letter from Kelly, St. Petersburg. Kelly and three others stocked up food and w^ater, entered an abandoned building, and agreed only that they would stay for ten days. By day three they had decided to bhnd-fold themselves for the remaining period and build a shrine. As I understand it, there is now a giant deer head sculpture in some unoccupied building in St. Pete.

From May 26 to June 8,2001, five collaborators confined themselves in a 26' by 20' squatted room with food, water, fasteners, adhesives, tools, makeshift sanitation and documentation equipment, and a decrepit 1985 Saab 900. While in the room, the group dismantled the car and made its parts into musical instruments. The participants wrote music and rehearsed it on the new instruments, shot video footage that they later edited into a documentary video, and collected words and images for a 'zine that they assembled afterwards. During that period, the only interchange between the room and the outside world was the heat, light, and air flowing in and out, the electricity flowing in, and the webcam data flowing out.

Premise ^1

Account

Automobile Re-Vision Project, Thinktank Number Eight

Thinktank 555

Compiled from journal entries:

Thinktank 55^

We all met at my place at 7:00 that morning, packed up the car and (thank god it started') shoved off for a two-week road trip. By 7:30 a.m. we had traveled eight and a half miles, more than enough driving for two weeks. We idled briefly in front of the small brick building before driving through its double doors. With a turn of the key, the car's engine went quiet for the last time, and our travels began.