Wednesday 24 March 2010

Catching Up With The Unabomber Cabin


Modelled on the one Henry David Thoreau built at Walden by way of Stewart Brandt’s Whole Earth Catalogue, the cabin Ted Kaczynski built for himself in the woods outside Lincoln Montana had neither electricity or running water. It was from this location that he launched his deadly ‘Unabomber’ campaign and also where he composed his manifesto Industrial Society And its Future. Following his arrest in 1996, the cabin was impounded by the FBI as evidence and moved from its original site. This paper version was sent to me Felix, a contact in Barcelona. The fact that it’s a jpeg of a handicraft ‘kit’ version of a handmade structure distributed online suggests that the true architecture of the Unabomber Cabin is as much conceptual and temporal as it is spatial.

It’s been a while since I posted anything in the ‘Catching Up With...’ series; but I am planning some additions to it over the Easter period. It takes a very long time for a building to give up all of its meanings.

See also:
Catching Up With – previous posts in the series
Lutz Dammbeck’s The Net at the Roxy Bar and Screen

3 comments:

Palm Wine said...

Dear Ken,
I suggest you a recent group exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, which dealt somehow with Unabomber cabin. There was a recreation of it by the artist Robert Kusmirowski.
cheers
Simone --
palm-wine.blogspot.com

Palm Wine said...

here is it:
http://www.palaisdetokyo.com/fo3/low/programme/index.php?page=nav.inc.php&id_eve=2722&prog=41

Ken Hollings said...

Dear Simone,

Many thanks for this link: I wish I'd known about this exhibition before - not only for Kusmirowski's reconstruction of the cabin (I love the fact that Thoreau's cabin has also been reconstructed in a car park) but the group show's concern with the electromagentic spectrum - which is something Craig Baldwin and I discussed last week at Resonance FM. My respects to you.