About this project

OUR PLAN -

We're starting an experimental multi-disciplinary residency program within the city of Detroit: DFLUX.ORG, the Detroit Research Studio. It is basically a homegrown think tank located in our neighborhood of 'No-Ham' / 'Banglatown' / 'Hamtramck Heights' and we're hard at work planning our first session for this summer. We will use our self-renovated $100 house as the DFLUX studio hub, and will be joined by a rotating cast of creative characters (including artists, architects, political scientists, historians and writers) to discover and celebrate the people, possibilities, spaces and stories of Detroit.

We've already got a bunch of tools, ample workspace, bikes, stoves for making natural dye-baths (using nearby abundant indigenous Michigan plants and wildflowers), and a stash of home-made low-power FM transmitters along with a modest grant that covers our administrative costs for the summer ... but we need your help!

OUR HOPE -

We're asking for your support in creating our 'Resident Fund' for the accomplished folk joining us in residence this summer. This 'Resident Fund' will cover two primary things: 1. research materials (part honorarium, part materials fund) for our residents and 2. publication costs for the 'DFLUX 2010 JOURNAL with Audio CD', which will document and celebrate our residents' explorations into the neighborhood at large. Our projection of the budget is simply half for research materials and half for publication costs for the 2010 DFLUX JOURNAL with Audio CD. And while we (the organizers) are artists by profession, we're striving to bring in as many experienced people from other disciplines as possible to enliven the conversation.

YOUR SUPPORT -

We firmly believe that folks should be paid for their work and want to provide honoraria and travel support for our accomplished residents so that they may more freely investigate Detroit at such a fascinating time in its evolution. And while the "research materials" will ultimately be determined by our residents as they develop their work on-site, the list of supplies could include: more local produce to cook additional dinners for neighbors as a means to gather stories and interviews, materials to prototype wind turbines so that our neighbors can inexpensively build them and sell energy back to the city of Detroit, or perhaps less-functional or more-surreal public spectacles like urban-wild-pheasant-hunting webisodes or the like!

Speaking of local produce, Detroit, as many of you likely already know, has been re-greening for quite a while and does indeed have a vibrant urban farming scene. As such, we intend to support our local urban farmers by feeding our residents and frequent dinner guests fresh local produce and foodstuffs. So, contributions to our fund will ultimately support local farms also.

The "publication materials" portion of the budget will provide for the printing of the DFLUX 2010 JOURNAL with Audio CD. We have budgeted for approximately 500 copies of a 100 page book with an accompanying audio CD with stories, interviews and field recordings collected by our residents.

JUST A LITTLE CONTEXT -

Our residency would not have a home were it not for the future. No, we're not talking about the early Flaming Lips album Hit to Death in the Future Head, or even the environmentally ominous book Our Stolen Future (although we do love them). We're talking about the city of the future: Detroit!, which has in recent days captured the imagination and interest of a lot of people. After all, it is incredibly different than most other American cities and truly confounds most visitors. Having evolved from being the 'city of the future' of days past, with automobile production literally and metaphorically driving the American Dream into ubiquity, to being the 'city of the future' of the present, as the post-industrialized re-greening urban space now under enormous pressure to succeed as perhaps the first metropolitan shrinky dink, Detroit is a city with impossibly rich stories and over 800,000 possible storytellers should we care to look.

And so flashing forward - or back - to the recent and ongoing foreclosure crisis, we purchased a house for $100 in a familiar neighborhood in Northeast Detroit. We saw it as an opportunity to join friends somewhere in the middle of an altogether surreal metamorphosis of the once hyper-striated American Dream Factory as it becomes a flattened, green and improbably smooth space, in every sense of the term. So we bought our once-foreclosed, twice-burned house with its own snow drift in the attic.

Much to our surprise, the house - and our purchase of it - became famous exactly between our offer of $100 and the signing of closing papers, courtesy of an op-ed piece by a friend in the New York Times. And as we found ourselves interviewed repeatedly for the same story, it became clear to us (with a few exceptions), that the media's interest in investigating took a back seat to the quick soundbites recorded to round-out their otherwise seemingly pre-written stories. This is to say that Detroit, a city so abundantly overlooked and deeply nuanced, is more easily characterized as either the most dangerous city in America or as a blank slate in need of overhaul by outside forces, rather than viewed as a site for deeper investigation. And thus, we find ourselves seeking to find and share the often untold stories or unearthed futures hidden in our neighborhood. So it is with great pleasure that we present DFLUX as our own attempt to counter the mythologies in current circulation by way of inviting others to share with us in exploring the city's nuanced and complex ironies in the most creative manner possible.

It is important to mention that we would not be nearly as enthusiastic about future explorations of Detroit were it not for a big heaping handful of truly inspirational projects preceding us. Our very inconclusive list herein pays tribute to (in no particular order): the Heidelberg Project, the Motor City Blight Busters, the Greening of Detroit, the Power House Project, venues like the Gold Dollar, movies like Roger & Me and Poletown Lives!, the more recent Ice House project, local media sites detroityes.com and modelDmedia.com and zines like Stupor, among others. Again this list is completely inconclusive but we nevertheless herein offer a hearty thanks to them.

THANK YOU -

Thanks for your interest and for taking time to read about our hopes and plans! We hope you will agree that there is much to learn from the city of Detroit, and that an expanding network of creative explorers and readers alike might well find inspiration and enjoyment within the pages of our journal-to-be!