The Mine Project
multimedia installation/performance and crowd projects

The Mine Project is the result of years of imagining by visual artists Mau Schoettle and Kate Hamilton about what could be done in Widow Jane Mine (Rosendale, NY) that would embrace its unique dreamlike environment along with the truth of its hard history and current issues of security and data storage.  The Mine Project draws on the rich and crazy history of the mines of Rosendale that began as a geological layering of dolostone made of the compressed bones of billions of tiny sea creatures. The hay days of Rosendale limestone mining were from the 1830’s until 1950’s.  Nineteenth century miners excavated many square miles of limestone to make cement to build cities.  In the 20th century, there was a widespread move to fill the voids of former mines with high-security vaults for government and corporate data storage.  During the cold war, many of these transformed mines were also developed into luxury bomb shelter housing for corporate and government leaders.   The mines were also used for mushroom and trout farming before they were developed into bomb shelters and document storage.

DaDa Spill is the first in what will be a series of ongoing events presented under The Mine Project umbrella.

The title of this event refers to the term: ‘data spill’ – a security breach – the intentional or unintentional release of secure information to an un-trusted environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_breach
‘Dada’ is the name of an art/literary movement that originated in reaction to the horrors of World War 1.  Dada relies on intuition, nonsense and irrational thought in order to search for sense in a seemingly senseless universe.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada
http://arthistory.about.com/cs/arthistory10one/a/dada.htm

The DaDa Spill #1 experiment

video link        https://vimeo.com/79161921         password: dada

July 28, 2013.  3:00-5:00. The Widow Jane Mine, Rosendale, NY.    This first event of this project was staged within the vast half-acre interior space of the abandoned cement mine.  This monumental room and pillar style mine consists of enormous sloping bedrock, 18’ wide and 30’ tall standing stone pillars and an expansive groundwater lake.  The space is evocative of a ruin of a great ancient hall.  This multimedia installation, performance, crowd project investigated the extraordinary local/global phenomenon of data and the current use of mines for document storage,  and the meaning of security and insecurity, and privacy with humor and in the spirit of Dada.   The crowd wore our miners’ helmets and participated in the bureaucratic process of securing their data!  There were numerous overlapping presentations,  a dada poem creation,  sounds and visual images, 2 scenes of a play by Elana Greenfield were performed on ladders standing in the interior lake and Poulenc was sung by the ghost soldier .  Documents were created, exposed, processed, discarded, stored, recovered, and eaten.  And the shredder blew the whistle.

The result was a massive Dada data spill.

Many many people were involved in this project.  Please see the program for the event to see who.

more events to come…