The E-Team: Projects "Quick Click" and "127 Illuminated Windows"
This is a reference post of some largely unreported facts related to September 11, 2001.
The North Tower had 110 floors. American Airlines 11 allegedly struck the North Tower at 8.46 AM on September 11, 2001 between the 93rd and 99th floors.
Moukhtar Kocache, Director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, wrote a summary of the Quick Click and 127 Illuminated Windows projects on February 28, 2002.
International Foundation For Art Research
September 11th:
ART LOSS, DAMAGE, AND REPERCUSSIONS
Proceedings of an IFAR Symposium on February 28, 2002The Artist Residency Program in the Twin Towers
I feel like the representative of "unofficial" art at this Symposium, not only because of the nature and the value of the art that I will talk about, but also because of the context and framework in which it was made. In fact, what I would like to do tonight is reexamine or, perhaps, expand our notions of loss or what was lost on September 11th, and in so doing, explore our notions of what the purpose of art is; its value, or its use. What is cultural production? What is visual culture? What is an artist? Who is an artist? What is an art experience? I will try to do that by illustrating some of the projects that were executed during the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's (LMCC) artist residency program in the WTC.
The program was initiated four years ago and provided emerging artists with studio space on the 91st and 92nd floors of the North Tower. Artists worked in painting, sculpture, new media, photography, and art installation and were selected by a jury for residencies that lasted six months. At the end of each six-month period, the studios were opened to the public. Thousands of people came to the Open Studios each year. The LMCC also organized public performances in the large plaza of the Trade Center for thousands of audience members. . . a venue often noted as one of the city's most democratic public spaces.
I'd like to focus initially on what was lost in terms of the Towers themselves—the architecture, the icons, and, for us, the "subjects" for over one hundred and fifty artists and cultural workers and producers. Slowly, I will highlight what has been lost in terms of opportunities, possibilities, context, and a whole world of references in the form of visual but also conceptual and political material. You have to remember that we did not go to work every day into the buildings simply because our offices and studios happened to be there, but precisely because they were located in the Twin Towers and our desire was to analyze them from within. Let me start for instance with Martina Gecelli, who in the year 2000, photographed abandoned office spaces at the Trade Center that were left in complete disrepair. For Martina, the architecture, the space, and the psychology of the space became her subject matter (Fig. I).
A project by the E-Team, a performance art group, also dealt with the building itself. In Quick Click, the E-Team attempted to make photographic portraits of people in the studio from a helicopter that was hovering outside the building. Two members of the E-Team were in the helicopter, another in the studio space, and people were lined up along the windows to have their portraits taken. In another project (127 Illuminated Windows), the E-Team attempted to write their names on the exterior of the Towers themselves (Fig. 2).
Many other projects dealt with the specificity of the Trade Center site. In a performance entitled The Land of Far Beyond, Susan Kelly embarked on a pilgrimage up the staircase from the first floor to the 91st floor. For My America (I am Still Here), Emily Jacir documented purchases from every store of the Trade Center, which revealed the mechanics of power in global trade and production. Taketo Shimada envisioned a project on the escalator steps entitled Meeting, for which he would write poetry on the escalator steps describing a love affair that arises after a chance meeting.
Kevin and Jennifer McCoy, new media artists, created a fictive company called Airworld, which, eerily, has a logo of two airplanes, flying in each other's directions and joined at the wings. Their company Web site had absurd advertising banners that critiqued the sterile language used by corporate America. One banner read Safe Ascent, another, Welcome We Are Air. During their residency the McCoy's also broadcast from their studios an FM radio signal that you could hear if you were driving on the West Side Highway.
Another important loss on 9/11 was access to the views, this particular vantage point on the city. These views and that particular vision of the city, its topography and geological profile provided a unique opportunity for individuals, whether at work in their offices, visiting the observation deck or dancing at Windows on the World. Subject matter for numerous paintings created in the residency programs, such as Joellyn Duesberry's Cloud Over Mid-Town Brooklyn and Manhattan and Sonya Sklaroff's WTC Series, these views of the city were also central to many sculptural, installation, or performance-based projects. Matthew Bakkom, in 1 WTC Cinema, explored issues relating to the building, the city, and architecture in film screenings that were open to the public. It was a beautiful experience to watch cinema and art films with the skyline of New York City visible through the windows. For Picture Motion, Douglas Ross installed motorized blinds on the windows, which, in a darkened room, created a stroboscopic effect—the city looked like a film projected in slow motion. The last work that was produced in the WTC studios, on September 4th, was a project by Naomi Ben Shahar. She invited her friends to a party and provided everyone with headlamps. The room was covered with mylar so the city lights and the movement of the partygoers intermixed in a sort of a liquid, reflective environment.
Countless projects were destroyed. Micki Watanabe's, Floorplan Collage: WTC 91st floor and 15 Park Ave. A project by Christyian Nguyen referencing the Asian panel landscape painting tradition, A Thousand Peaks and Myriad Ravines, had been installed in the Port Authority's offices (Fig. 3). Jeff Konigsberg's untitled work in progress that he had worked on for four months—carving, painting, peeling—creating an incredible three-dimensional experience out of dry-wall. Simon Aldridge's minimalist wall sculptures that reference skateboard and BMX structures, and Hot Fun in the Summertime, a piece which illustrated his struggle in rendering the towers as light structures that emphasized verticality but at the same time allowed light to come in and reflection to take place.
Just a week before the attacks, Justine Cooper moved all of her work from the past two years to the WTC studio. Everything was stored there during the attack, including her three-dimensional luminous sculptures of gene sequences, a sculptural MRI of her hands, and numerous photographs from electron microscopes (Fig. 4). Kara Hammond also lost many, many paintings and drawings. Again, she had stored some of her work from the past two years in the studio, including Showroom Floor, Voskhod Interior, and Concrete Warehouse (Fig. 5).
Below is a video made of the “Quick Click” project by Daniel Sieple.
This is a difficult video to watch. I’m sure many of these people died. I think they did this to collect souvenirs- as serial killers are prone to do.
Below is Figure 2, the photo of the “127 Illuminated Windows.”
Figure 2. E-Team (Hajoe Moderegger,
Franziska, Lamprecht, Dan Seiple).
127 Illuminated Windows.
The appearance as it was supposed to be on the World Trade Center. New York, March 2001. Photo: LMCC
Below is a better picture of the “127 Illuminated windows” of the E-Team, next to a picture of the North Tower where American Airlines 11 allegedly hit.
They think they got away with it and they’re smug about it. Moukhtar Kocache made a video called ““Planning for Impact: Making the Case for Arts and Culture” by Moukhtar Kocache on Dec 17, 2019.
“Impact means the TYPE OF CHANGE. OUTCOMES means the RESULTS. INDICATORS are EVIDENCE OF SUCCESS.”
P.S. There exists today an organized disinformation effort that claims the dust clouds resulting from the demolition of the World Trade Center Towers were a result of some “direct energy weapon” that pulverized the Towers. These disinformationists imply that structural concrete supports could not collapse, and so the dust clouds are a result of a direct energy weapon that turned them to dust.
Facts are, there were no concrete structural supports in the World Trade Center. There was a lot of gypsum, or sheetrock, which has almost no structural support value. That material comprises much of the resulting dust cloud.
I don’t know how many of you have been duped by this crowd, but they are an organized effort to provide a false alibi for those who demolished the towers with standard methods of the demolition industry. It would have been a simple demolition due to the lack of concrete supports.
USG Sheetrock® Brand World Trade Center Project Profile (English), 2014
When the original twin towers of the World Trade Center rose above the New York City skyline in the late 1960s and early 70s, they made history not only for their height, but also for their construction materials. They were the first ultra high-rise buildings designed without any masonry and instead used a gypsum shaft wall system invented by USG Corporation.
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