on tour

On May 13 1985, an all-day standoff and gun battle between Philadelphia police and the radical group MOVE ended with the police dropping a bomb on the house. The subsequent fire killed 11 people and destroyed 62 homes.

The Hutu majority in Rwanda organized and implemented the mass slaughter of the Tutsi minority. In just 100 days an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000,000 Tutsi were killed.

Longitude / latitude coordinates of the location where the RMS Titanic sank in 1912.

Address of the home where Sharon Tate and four others where murdered by followers of Charles Manson in 1969.

New Mexico site of the first atomic bomb test.

The slogan, "work makes (one) free", placed at the entrances of many Nazi concentration camps.

The GPS coordinates of John F. Kennedy's assassination site in Dallas,Texas.

great proletarian cultural revolution

mount carmel center

The bloodiest single-day battle in American history resulting in approximately 23,000 casualties

A doctrine used to rationalize U.S. territorial expansion in the 1840s and 1850s. It asserted that the expansion of the United States throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable. This created the environment in which many dark sites would develop, the Alamo and Little Big Horn to name a few.

AKA Jonestown, the site of the 1978 mass "revolutionary suicide"

Dark tourism is defined as "the act of travel and visitation to sites, attractions and exhibitions which have real or recreated death, suffering or the seemingly macabre as a main theme." Other sub genres exist as well, including Poverty tourism, Suicide tourism, Grief tourism, Doomsday tourism and Prison tourism.

It's human nature to want to be an eye witness to these events. We often don't like to admit that we are at all interested in these activities even while participating in them on a daily basis. Rubbernecking at a car wreck on the highway, watching crime shows & war movies on TV reveals our natural curiosity in disasters and human suffering, as long as we are merely onlookers and not participants.

Often denying our fascination with death and depravity, we like to think that by participating as an observer, we can help alleviate the pain of the experienced drama through education & understanding, although a fine line exists between curiosity and exploitation. While acknowledging the attraction that brings visitors to the prison in the first place, I want to connect the prison to this larger phenomenon by offering it up as an imaginary station or porthole of egress to other infamous dark sites. Encountering the signs as they travel through the prison enables the viewer to experience the act of visiting all of these sites simultaneously, giving the viewer a denser experience of this phenomenon.