The Last Road Trip on Earth
01
Prologue ⋅ Detroit 17th Sep 2050
Slowly now, so many years later in this ruined earth of The Fossil Fuel, we plant electric sweetgrass on our land. A Native Indian crop, it staves off insects and now gently eats the toxic soils of past industry. Vibrating augmented in the breeze, it glows towards night fall forming small shiny nuggets of CO2 that we use to cook.
House
I like picking them with little Ray and Franny, filling her geometric baskets before walking to the village green house. Nice to work a few hours there, repairing the coloured LEDs where needed, chatting to fellow artists.
Cell Ground
Bullet Proof
We are so technologically advanced we are primitive again. It’s the simple life now, the end of mass-production. The end of mass-consumption. Only local legal. We had to lose 15 major coastal cities for the tide to change. Millions dead. We knew that would happen a 100 years before.
Incubator
Thanks to The End of Engines (over 20 years ago now) and with self-driving load cars finally shared to every door, we live in connected villages: Ren Gen Villages with urban farming in the ruins of factories, roads replaced with roam space. The self-learning software that followed Big Data has eased everything. Our houses are heated by quantum servers.
Outside
An age of Art that is not commodity. But The Scene respects, and we do barter and swap. There still is wealth creation, but shared. The End of The 1% was a Revolution. It meant re-thinking Capitalism and admitting it is social and always was. We generally fabricate what we need, with communal tools like the robot arms in the village workshop.
Flood
Since polluting de-salination plants closed in 2040, balancing the water table is now our biggest daily work. We have the careful tasks of collecting water vapour from the fields of 3D printed branches, ionization, hydrogen fuel tanking, rain capturing, flood water control, filtering for drinking water, evaporation monitoring and safeguarding Bloody Run River, the underground creek that runs below us.
White sands
02
Detroit Sculpture ⋅ Rare Earth
Detroit Epitaph, 2016, mild steel, Eastern Market
You made it. 18,000 miles a fun and dangerous ride. And at least 150,000 miles before us. The Car’s Dead. It’s back home now. It’s the memory of our road trip. that once-in-a-life-time-road-trip. My girlfriend pregnant, driving the sunset continually it was Terminator – though I was there – Mad Max, Thelma. I guess that makes me Louise, DeathRace2000, DuelChristineBullitt, DeathProofFearAndLoathing they merge. Us 3 driving V8 West, post-apocalypse into the burning sun.
Bead Museum
Fell in love with Detroit a few years back. Kept coming back yearning for that big space. No interest in the suburbs it’s right here I feel it. The epicentre of the Capitalist Project that clearly failed in how it abandoned so many. Some basic infrastructure would be nice. Buses. Schools. Clean Water. Cheap Water. Food shops. Jobs. Cheap Land Tax. Not to be Foreclosed. Not to be poisoned. Not to be jacked by your own people, jacked by the State every day.
Detroit
Jacked by Capitalism: it seems crystal clear as soon as one invents The Production Line, Man i.e. Labour is a problem. Human Labour is just too expensive. It’s the immediate beginning of the end. Ford could see the feedback loops. Pay workers more at first, they can afford stuff – the very Product they make. House them and they will need The Product to get to work to make The Product. Make The Product sexy, powerful, change it each year so you Want It. Bring workers from countries afar and fill them with The Dream. What a Dream, what a Time, the epicentre of the World, of industrial power, the birth of mass-consumption, style, technology, money. wow. Quite literally The Outcome of the Industrial Revolution.
Heildelberg
A friend told me Ford would organise theatrical performances for the workers. A dance of different folkloric costumes all one by one climbing into a large cauldron, and out they came in tailcoats and top hats, a unified dance formation. Assimilate. Belong. Welcome.
Drone Trevorcutts Wrongway
The El Camino is this Powerful Object of Desire. How fantastic it is. And Big Capitalist Thinking. The end of it. Boom and Bust. The passing of time. The incredible deco skyscrapers that have been abandoned till only now. The toxic soil. The amazing labour. The Death of Cities. Inventions from Babbage to Farraday to Tesla and Edison. To all the good technologies we lost through greed. The lives of the hard working, the lives of the not. Techno Underground, Hipster Detroit and a global Utopian Vision with Detroit in it’s veins. The Urban Farm, The Organic Market, Local Entrepreneurs, nothing to do with Stadium, nor Casino.
Train Station
Slowly but surely the world divests of Fossil Fuels. Lobbyists scramble, investors take new bets Renewables are in. Oil $ so low, no point fracking. It’s Over. Energy is right there for free all this time and they knew it. Norway will ban the combustion engine from cities first.
So here is an Epitaph. An electric storm gathers. Alfred Bridge is torn down. Eastern Market grows anew. Detroit grows again fraught of course. All that is burnt is now grass. The endless sound of freight trains braking engraves in me as I make my way each day here. A Chevy for Chief Pontiac in Bull’s Blood Red. A totem for Bloody Run River. A memory of Industry. A homage to V8 style and roadtrippin fantasy. A last road trip in the age of Fossil Fuels.
Dammed Wheel Club
03
The Car ⋅ A ’73 V8 El Camino SS
Crazy to think New York was buzzing with 3000 electric cars in 1908 – what would the world be if Ford hadn’t crushed it all with his production-line-efficiency. Imagine how it would be now if it was the Detroit Electric that had been the success.
Dream
I can’t believe the guy who invented leaded petrol to make Ford’s engine work: he also created CFC gases for Edison’s new electric fridge. The damage just one man can do. We didn’t know it at the time of course.
Sunset
Far from a critique, the age of petrol engines was a fantastic ride. OK the government subsidizes gas prices but hey that meant we could ride a 1973 Chevy straight block 350 SS at 7mpg right across America in 2016 at $19 a full tank.
Headline
A lovely ride. The V8 growling, pulling, purring loud, and the bench seat like a lux leather sofa high def sunset beamed into your eyes with gliding G force.
White Sands
I knew that an engine like that was made the same for over 40 years, that we could break down anywhere – the next farm would probably have a spare.
Hoist
OK I won’t buy an old car in Upstate New York again. Some place where it don’t rain. Incredible that we made it at all. 18,000 miles across The States. We didn’t know till after that it was spraying gas all over, that it could have burst into flames, that the chassis was so rusty it could have broke in half on a rough Puebloan road.
Nose
Lost the entire exhaust. Threw the car at 70mph like a high jump pole digging in. A kind soul on an empty road for 300 miles helped prise it all off. With kitchen roll in our ears we got to Santa Fe. New muffler and some welded, then new carburettor, somehow the piston covers were punched through, chrome ones to replace. All new tires and smashed by the road to Marfa the guy had headlights for ’73 El Caminos, the last on his shelf. I was thinking at this rate when we arrive it will be a brand new car but no, a blow out at Houston bent the rear side out. Brakes failing, doors not closing, leaking in Houston it died. A lovely guy at Classic Cars of Houston refused to touch it but held it till I could ship it back Home, to it’s birth land, Detroit. An online friend of a friend and his motorcycle club seemed a perfect choice to turn it into The Epitaph. Stripped, lightweight, preserved, it’s home now, an eccentric beauty of a beast. A grandmother’s, surfer’s, Latino’s democratic psychedelic dream. A V8 superstar, the best car I ever drove. Thank you El Camino, you literally were The Way.
04
The Land ⋅ A Chevy for Chief Pontiac
I’ve sat here for days. Marvelling at this incredible landscape. I’ve seen nothing like it. Detroit. The sheer scale of it all. A vast big sky. To my back an electricity station, corrugated metal walls high and tagged with generating pylons above. To my left: ‘wasteland’, though no such a thing really. Made up of slithers of land owners between Alfred and Division. Overgrown, marshy. To my right a vast industrial trench. Two beaten bridges dangerously span to Eastern Market across The Cut. Dequindre, what I call The Low Line.
The Land
Along it’s length crumbing factory as far as you can see. Broken grids of concrete frame, tall metal water towers graffitied silhouetted, dangerous chimney stacks and parts of large black machinery, all of the ass end of Eastern Market unfolds. In the distance past a lonely church spire is the small cluster of Downtown skyscraper. Renaissance Centre glimmers it’s own sci-fi fantasy and empty 20’s deco scrapers mesmerise. Can I see The Guardian Building? My favourite skyscraper.
Sugar Factory 1940
In front of me the slaughterhouse wall. Murals. In front of that, mosquitoes and a large concrete block.
I went to the Library. I looked up all the old maps thinking it would have been a warehouse there 5 years ago. No it was 70. Time slides like no place in Detroit. A 1940’s sugar factory was here, and trains along The Cut. Now all is left is the concrete loading bay. It’s a plinth, a stage. An arena. A Sacrificial Alter.
Native Land
The Cut
Looking at maps further back I discover it is the site of converging water ways. Detroit covered up the rivers as it expanded. Gridded over. No thought for sewerage or flood control so now the freeways spill over. The water is polluted. It’s short-sighted. It’s a scandal.
Alfred Bridge
Alfred Gone
Not only that: this is the very land Chief Pontiac killed 2 dozen British soldiers. A righteous massacre – the river ran red with their blood. Seems a game of cricket was the time to do it. Strange to think of the blood of Indians, The French, The Brits and so many more fill this soil that is red with iron oxide, sugar and hexachrome. This land is possessed. It’s population abused. Homeless. Detroit is truly Haunted. Look at Rivera’s mural and the frieze of coal and iron ore. Crystals from the Earth in vast hands and below a machine throng of workers like no other, Consumed, Labour. Flesh Machine.
Diego Rivera
05
Future Ritual ⋅ No Energy Lost
We lived underground for years. Outside was…. unsociable for a while.
Below our land we found a vast network of salt tunnels last used for winter roads in the (19)40s. We dug and connected to the industrial steam network that stretched below downtown skyscrapers to form a vibrant under-earth city.
A lot of buildings were barricaded already, so accessing them from underground worked very well.
Detroit Postcard
We would emerge at the car, and venture out. The Fossil Fuel Revolution was an epic 20 years, people thought it was the end of the world and as a result behaved with some depravity. They just couldn’t see that everything was going to be OK. They had to let go of their Rare Earth products: they caused untold damage over there, just for yet another disposable smart device over here.
Plastics were banned globally then. Vast Hemp fields covered most of America. Many lives were lost fighting the corporations trying to control all this. But after 60 years of renewables, of ethanol captured from manufacturing CO2, of self-sufficient urban farming, free water from condensation, and all the block chain currencies and free intranetworks, the old economy stalled. After the huge world movements of civil unrest, the governments capitulated.
Red-Stage
Sonic Field
During this 5th Revolution, the air became fresh. The Tech was viable. Our shuttle-sharing economy meant our RenGen village was as close or remote as any other.
Comms Tower
Our biggest success was using these salt caves under Detroit as a massive battery, channeling steam and focused sunlight to incredible temperatures for a molten flow of salt that swelled and sank day and night, breathing for us.
Social Arena
We started to meet at The Car. It became a regular thing, a tentative social gathering that evolved into a music mash up festival atmosphere with impressive DIY sound systems attached to utility poles at a mile radius. People would venture out and all would be welcome. Guns were banned because honestly we just didn’t need them. We had a Living Wage, food, electronic music, drugs in moderation and a history of post-industrial tech to draw on.
Guardian Building
My favorite work, which I can hear right now, is when we connected up the utility broadcast network to mics buried in the salt cave compound. We amplified the flow, cracking and breathing and made a crystal electric ambient score that soared over us like beautiful sea shore waves. We would cross-fade it to loud over the week before the monthly Gathering.
Girl and Sheep
Baby Ray is grown up now, a respected electronic musician, her main focus is materials development. Beyond the nano was so much more space to discover.