Brother Islands

Brother Islands is an "expanded documentary" about involuntary isolation and its machinery as seen through the sights and sounds of two forgotten islands. The stories and images collected from these quarantines have been shown as a series of artworks in various media.

Half a century since its abandonment, North Brother Island fades from New York City's map as nature swallows this one block square quarantine city. Just down the East River, Ward's Island warehouses New York's homeless and mentally ill in a dozen immense buildings clustered under the RFK/Triborough Bridge.

Brother Islands premiered in 2007 at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center in New York City in a sold out performance and has since been shown as live media lectures and interactive video installations.

The 2012 Brother Islands window/wall piece is a looping digital painting of abstract, layered video imagery showing glimpses of North Brother's long abandoned island quarantine. QR codes frame the video and link to a first-person account of island life in today's homeless shelters. This work is a collaboration between Benton-C Bainbridge, who produced and conceptualized the installation, with original text by Bill Etra.

The 2007 Brother Islands performance combined physical theater, audio, video and stereoscopic photography to paint a haunting picture of the ill-fated islands. The performers explored location in relationship to history, memory, and representation. Audio and video field recordings became raw materials for live digital manipulation; by presenting these sights and sounds around the centralized audience, a documentary movie became a performance of a place.

Co-directed by Eyebeam's 2007 Education Lab Fellow Benton-C Bainbridge and designer Minou Maguna, Brother Islands incorporated the stereo photography of Matthew Schlanger, stories of Bill Etra, music of Ross Goldstein and performance of Ryder Cooley and Dan Winckler, who played ghosts from Brother Island's past.

The use of Ward's Island as a resting ground for the marginalized traces back through the turn of the century, when it contained the world's largest psychiatric hospital. As the location of one of the world's highest capacity sewage treatment centers, the island remains a terminal for the city's refuse.

North Brother Island's history is similarly bleak. Notorious as a harsh hospital/prison and locus of misfortunate legends like Typhoid Mary and the General Slocum ferry disaster, after decades of failed schemes to repurpose the land have gone fruitless, North Brother has literally gone to the birds. Off-limit to visitors, the island is now a vital resting place for herons, egrets and other migrants.

In November 2006 Bainbridge and Schlanger received permission to join a team from the NYC Parks Department team to travel to and photograph North Brother, which led to the creation of Brother Islands.

Brother Islands is made possible with support by VOOMHD Lab, Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, NYSCA, CUNY-TV and Experimental Television Center.

Brother Islands performance collaborators:
Music Composer: Ross Goldstein is an American Musician, Artist/Photographer, and Linguistic Deconstructionist. His “United States of Belt” recording project is a subliminal exploration of the American landscape/mindscape, combining field recordings, experimental music, and studio magic. Goldstein’s latest record “Trail Songs” is a psycho-linguistic roadtrip through the topography of American bubble gum music. Ross’ poetically anti-jingoistic lyrics serve as giant, colorful billboards on a highway of beautiful, infectious melodies. Goldstein resides in Troy, NY where his collection of hand-painted signs play a vital role in keeping the public bewildered about what the hell is going on.
Co-director/Designer: Minou Maguna's experience ranges from work as a set designer for films as well as "environmental" designs for art spaces. Maguna is exploring the intersection of architecture, sociology and art through physical modeling with projected lights and the use of digital and traditional production to create
experiences.
3D Photographer: Matthew Schlanger's video exhibitions include Monte Video (Amsterdam), the Whitney Biennial, PS1, and The Kitchen (NYC), among others. Matthew's video hardware development work for the Experimental Television Center included a significant contribution in building the last generation of custom analog and digital image and sound synthesizers currently installed at ETC.
Performer ("Poltergeists"): Ryder Cooley is a multi-media artist and musician currently living in Troy, New York. Weaving together chimeric visions with residue of daily life, her work reveals a terrain of lost dreams and phantom memories. Working with found materials and personal myth, she creates cinematic performances and installation environments.
Performer ("Poltergeists"): Dan Winckler has performed at Eyebeam, MenschMeerMedien Festival 2007 (Bremen, DE), SubTonic, { R } a k e, EyeWash, the Tank, ISEA 2006, and with many artists including Benton-C Bainbridge, Nullsleep, Buck Howdy, Ralph’s World, Bit Shifter, Koosil-ja, Glomag, David Sugar, Grisha Coleman, Axel Himmelmann, and the immortal Lance Blisters. He is a core member of SHARE, a non-profit organization that hosts collaborative audio/visual jams in New York and other cities around the world. He has performed bare stage improvisation with Gunshow and video improvisation with the ground-breaking groups Neutrino and Improv Everywhere.
Ghost FX/Performer ("Tex"): Bill Etra
Ghost Video FX: vade (Anton Marini) is a freelance video engineer and new media programmer specializing in video and 3D systems for post production, visual effects and realtime systems. His work explores designing software environments and systems for realtime video and performing abstract visualizations and urban video collages. Anton Marini also holds a part time research position at Brooklyn Polytechnic Universities Integrated Digital Media Institute. He has performed at events such as BAP, Anyware, Share Montreal, Eyewash, Rake, Share @ The Kitchen, as well as leading several workshops in new media programming environments. His work has been featured and performed in music videos airing on MTV, on DVD and in venues across New York.
Sonic Spatialization: Jesse Stiles is a composer, multimedia artist, and sound designer. Stiles received a Watson Fellowship in 2000 to compose electronic music while traveling in India, Australia, and the UK for one year. His MFA thesis performance in Troy, New York opened the historic Gasholder Building to the public for the first time in 25 years, immersing hundreds of attendees in a performance of improvised electro-acoustic music and computer-controlled LED sculptures. He has performed and exhibited multimedia artwork internationally.
Editor/Live Camera: Eric Drasin studies New Media at SUNY Purchase College in New York. His family still does not understand what he does.
+1 (646) 338-9172 • benton-c{AT}benton-c.com
photo: Matthew Schlanger