Arnuflo, it would be nice to play with a back wall that changes color or
uses a singular bright color from our palette. It could change color
according to mood.
Production design
wingdale asylum seekers– a song name
this is a question from an interview with someone named Rick Moody. he writes novels and makes music and one of his songs inspires the name of his new band the “Wingdale Community Singers”
PM: How did you come up with the band’s name and what does it mean? The song title “Wingdale Asylum Seekers” gives a hint, I imagine, but can you explain it?
RM: When I was a kid, we used to go up into the country, I grew up in Connecticut suburbs, but we used to go up into upstate New York on weekends now and then. And we went up Route 22, which goes by an incredibly creepy, old state mental hospital called Harlem Valley Psychiatric Hospital, but it’s in this town called Wingdale and it’s popularly known as Wingdale. It scared the bejesus out of me as a kid. I mean these buildings were just as creepy as you would suspect, knowing later on what it was that was done within them. And they were very Stalinesque and scary. Since then it’s been closed down, it was closed during the institutionalization period when all of the state mental hospitals got emptied. So now they’re these Chernobyl-like ghost buildings. On the one hand Wingdale Community Singers sounds like an old-timey folk band, but on the other hand it has this luminous, scary Jungian layer of referring to the old psychiatric hospital.
harlem valley hospital location photos
here is a page of photos some adventurers put together of this potential location. you must see if these pique your interest.
and here is a link to a brief description of the two films that involve this filming location, Trapped in Silence (1986) and Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (2000).
Asylum corridor
user 17556639
in this article we see a list of internet search terms entered by a particular user. the private mental space is quickly availible for machine recognition. quiet desperation catalogued.
abandoned greenhouse
like the one in yonkers a bit, this one is near an abandoned insane asylum.
interiors
one girl variety show
here’s a public access cable variety show called msdivine. it’s one girl who plays all the characters. is she striving for insanity? she calls her show a hobby.
video vignettes
bill viola has taken his camera around to interesting places back in the early nineties. i like watching them even in this diminished web-theatre format. yes please i’d love to take the camera to do these things.
Pan’s Labyrinth
Pan’s Labyrinth
Originally uploaded by peter-noster.
i think you can follow this image's link to several other screenshots from the film. i'll post one other. it looks like the movie doesn't come out until october.
abandoned places nearby and otherwise
charlotte dustin and i went to the harlem valley psychiatric hospital today.
the redevelopment website
a blog post by some other people
here are some sites with links to a few nearby places
an interesting list of abandoned places mostly within 3 hours of nyc
newtown ct campus-like hospital
locations in the 5 boroughs
places around pa nj ny ct
new england ruins
some kind of abandoned places "crew"
a good site with nearby places and lots of links
here are a few sites about abandoned places more generally with a few locations sort-of nearby. or that i haven't looked at so thoroughly.
some old factory in belgium
some dude with an extensive collection on the subject
a good collection of links from all over europe and the us
an ny collection
a long list of links i haven't perused
a few links here to some new england places
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
If Sparta and Rome perished, what State can hope to endure for ever? If we would set up a long-lived form of government, let us not even dream of making it eternal. If we are to succeed, we must not attempt the impossible, or flatter ourselves that we are endowing the work of man with a stability of which human conditions do not permit. [Chapter 11 Death of the Body Politic; The Social Contract]
Madness…
is the result of an individuals’ deepest beliefs being challenged or revealed as false, and their consequent failure to adapt. So those beliefs first need to be ascertained.
A new evolutionary development? You could argue that the crucible of late capitalism is perfoming this experiment upon western society as we speak.
The systematic derangment of an individual is, I think, faciliated by knowing them, the more depth of knowledge the easier it would be to unseat their balance.
Foucault. “Madness is silenced by Reason.”
J.G Ballard
“That the future of science fiction, and for that matter of popular consciousness in general, lay not in outer space but in what I had already christened ‘inner space’, in a world increasingly about to be remade by the mind. ”
The Lure of the Madding Crowd:
Mental patients, and especially paranoiacs, have always shown a remarkable flair for ncorporating the latest scientific marvels into their fantasies, a talent they share with science-fiction writers.
One man’s journey to Bannerman’s Castle
bannerman’s castle
the exterior looks good. i doubt interior spaces like these are something we can use. these are results from a quick google search to inaugurate the blog.
mania 