The Corridor Project

Lake Placid Tower- Photo by Pat Greene

For years I’ve been fascinated by the ruins of Florida.

The times that I entered the abandoned tourist sites, like Xanadu, and Splendid China, are mixed memories.

These places started out as fantastical, otherworldly spots. They became shoddy, smelly ruins, that displayed the end of a dream. They gave homeless people shelter.

I always thought about how some of the money spent to create these places could have given these people a better shelter.

My longtime favorite ruin is the Lake Placid Tower, Lake Placid, Florida.

It’s in a parking lot on the side of Highway 27, next to a Chinese restaurant.

The structure is 240’ high. It opened in 1961. It closed in 1982. Ticket sales were low. The owner refused to pay his taxes. In 1986 it was opened up again, with a new owner. The new owner put a petting zoo next to it. He put a pay phone at the top. It was touted as the highest pay phone in Florida.

Another person bought it in 1992. It was open to the public until 2003.

The architect was Lakeland architect, A. Wynn Howell.

Forbidden fruit is exactly as nutritious as any other fruit.

Oh, surely, some biochemical ethicist will say that the adrenaline of sneaking around, the thrill of breaking a taboo constricts the blood vessels in your tongue and sharpens the receptors on your circumvallate taste buds papillae, thus inducing the sensation of extra sweetness.

I mean, I don’t know that; I’m just assuming.

But it doesn’t change the chemical composition of the fruit at all, of that I am sure.

Put another way: You don’t improve apples by throwing people in jail for eating them.

All this is to say, I do not walk past No Trespassing signs because I like the rush of being a naughty boy. I am forced to trespass in order to access some of the most beautiful environments in my city.

These are utility access paths for county vehicles to perform regular maintenance on retention ponds and pump houses. These grass lanes are more than 40-feet across in most places, banked by drainage ditches that drop down more than 12 feet.

Or, if you squint just right, it’s the road that leads to Shangri-La. Honah Lee. Neverland. Springfield.

These bright green roadways just off from Semoran promise the kind of adventure I spent most of my childhood looking for around every corner. Cutoff from the traffic that defines Central Florida, these miles of verdant roadway transport hikers to a half-manicured Wonderland, bursting with stories.

Under the right sky, the environment can become, as Baudelaire puts it, “poignant to the point of pain.” Venturing into these surreal grasslands always feels like it should end in a dragon or a wizard or god, but usually it’s just another subdivision.

My point is only that the city around you has more to offer than the paved and the permitted. Look between the buildings, under the rocks and behind the veil.

Where do you want to go? It’s probably already here.

                                             

Location, Location, Location (3L) is a collective art project, an ongoing effort that reaches and involves people in cities around the world, with Orlando being the headquarters or communication center. 

Artists will draw inspiration from places of significance to them, whether they be under-utilized spaces, local landmarks off the beaten path, or anything about the artists’ environment that speaks to them.  

My previous post gave an overall description of 3L. I wrote that each project will use text, audio, and visuals. 

I am still interested in those parameters, but I would like to relax them a little. I encourage participants to keep them in mind, but they aren’t a requirement. 

If someone wants to write a poem about a location, or video themselves in that spot reading the poem, playing a song, drawing a picture, or posting a photo with a caption, we welcome all of that. I think the latitude will open the possibilities of really creating momentum. 

Why do I want to do art projects based on location? There are many reasons. Living in Orlando, being confronted by the constant demolition of significant buildings, and looking around at buildings that suggest we have no history, is a part of that.

I live in Orlando. In my day-to-day life, I’m surrounded by a community, not tourism. When I tell people I’m from here, I’m often met with them telling me what Orlando is like, and it’s usually based on generalizations or experiences that I don’t normally encounter. 

When you draw a bowl of fruit or a portrait, you must look closely at the details if you want real results. Many times you see something that you didn’t see at a glance. I would like people to do that with locations.

Try to put aside assumptions. Really look, and listen. 

Recently the Czech writer Milan Kundera passed away. He wrote something that sums up how I feel about many things. It could be the base of 3L.

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes.”

Location, Location, Location

Location, location, location (LLL) is part of the Corridor Project. It is a site-specific art project that can be collaborative or solo. The artists will examine underrepresented, disregarded, ignored, underused, unused, or misused places. The examinations will use all of our five senses. They will all be rooted with field recordings because what we hear in a space that isn’t a conversation is not usually what we discuss or document. Artists can use drawings, video, photos, text, installations, performances, or whatever they need to tell the story of the space, 

The projects can be collaborations. The collaborations can be local or long-distance. 

I have collaborated on two of these projects. They haven’t been thoroughly documented. I collaborated on an abandoned skatepark outside of Vienna, and a former motel in Orlando.

LLL is anti-tourist. It’s unfulfilled dreams or dreams that were forgotten about. The John or Jane Doe of place. Psychogeographic. People walk through, drive-by, speculate about its future, or want to erase its past. Blighted. Beautiful. Destroyed ruins with a hearsay mythology. Forgotten, ignored. It needs to be restored, demolished, or replaced. A dangerfield, where people wait, drink, smoke, ingest, and have liaisons. 

The base is Orlando. The idea is to reach out and have local artists collaborate and communicate with people in many places. It is part art project, think tank, and artist and art exchange. 

FAVO in Orlando is a space that will host a show in November. I am looking at other spaces in Orlando. Another space is The Kommand Center in Debary, hosting house art and music shows for two years. It acts as a gallery, performance space, and residency.

I have been talking to artists in other cities. Bryan Baker and Jason Boardman in Knoxville. They have the Striped Light label and space in Knoxville. I’ve also been talking to Mike Khoury in Detroit. He has the Entropy Stereo space and music label. Leyya Tawil in Oakland, California, who also spends time in Detroit, has the TAC space in Oakland. Chris Cogburn, from No Idea Festival, will curate in Mexico City. Eve Payor at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. All of the people mentioned are also artists. 

We will start projects in Orlando. Projects can be shown all over the world or live online. We will make a gap of a month or more between presenting projects. It will be a collective, a gallery, and a think tank. 

The prospective artists can propose an idea and location to us. The process is informal. The plan is to make the project ongoing without a deadline. We can also propose a location for artists to analyze. Finally, we can find other artists who might want to collaborate. 

This is a way to look at spaces through an artist’s eyes. It’s not limited to conventional metrics. It’s purely subjective. We would love to have installations, performances, paintings, cooking, etc, at the Kommand Center and the other spaces mentioned. Maybe you create and perform a soundtrack of a location. 

There can be long-distance collaborations. An example would be if you were documenting a location, but you only want to work on the visual portion, you can send field recordings to a sound artist. Or any combination. 

Each project will become a zine with a cassette that examines the place. The cassette will have a soundtrack of these places. The zines will have text and images. (cont.)

One artist is working on a project using Cassadaga. A place that I would like to use is the Lake Placid Tower. We are working on a schedule. Reach out to me.

Note- This project can be done anywhere in the world. Wherever you are, or are going to be, can be the location of your display or performance. The Kommand Center will be the Central Florida hub, but the project can be done anywhere. Each project will also live online and with the zine and cassette. 

Propose ideas to me. I will discuss this with the people mentioned. Also, don’t get too caught up in the idea that your proposal has to be too refined. Your project might become something else. We will supply deadlines once we get details and discuss everything with participating artists. 

Burrow Press is a small literary press that operates out of Stetson University. Ryan Rivas, the publisher, will give us some space on his online literary journal to write articles about the project, as we move along. 

This project is a collaboration with Burrow Press, Striped Light, Entropy Stereo, TAC Oakland, No Idea Festival, Civic Minded 5, and Xylene Records. 

Pat Greene- hearsayu@gmail.com

407 913-1426