MC5 Ecstatic Energy Production 1966–1972 (incomplete)
Maps, paint marker, ink, adhesive vinyl, plexiglas
Dimensions Variable
2005/2007

MC5 Ecstatic Energy Production 1966-1972 (incomplete) maps selected concert dates of the legendary Detroit band over most of their career in conjunction with conspiracy theories drawn in part from Shea and Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy. In the final novel of the trilogy, a giant rock festival in Ingoldstat, Bavaria is designed to draw energy from the crowd in order to reanimate a Nazi legion buried at the bottom of a lake to do the bidding of The Illuminati.

Given that the safest way for any modern day secret society to control the world would be through economic manipulation rather than military domination, a primary resource for such control would have to be crowd energies from large spectacles. Events to draw the crowd energies would have to be orchestrated in such a manner as to not attract attention from competing factions which understood the techniques used. The dominant faction would likely already be in control of established events (professional sports, city or state theatre and orchestral groups, and so on), leaving rising factions to create their own events. This inevitably would lead to the rise of the countercultural ballroom circuit and music festivals. This project tracks one influential segment of that circuit through the filter of one band's history to illustrate the larger system at work.

The above images are from the 2007 installation in the UCLA New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles. A web-based version was commissioned in 2007, completed 2008 as part of the Viralnet.net MAPPING project and may be viewed at http://integr8dmedia.net/viralnet/2008/texts.html?text=bassett or http://instituteformysticalcapitalism.com/ecstatic_energy_generation