Last summer while imagining a visit to my cousin Shane in Territory, Colorado, I noticed that his twins had been obsessively drawing diagrams of bears driving cars. Recently, their town had been terrorized by an epidemic of bears breaking into cars and occasionally driving them short distances.-----------------------------------------------------
After a small quest with the twins, we discovered that there was a recent break-in that was odd. A bear broke into a Subaru, ripped its interior apart, but didn't drive anywhere. The local police had a theory that it accidentally turned on the stereo, and the music from the tape scared it off. Miraculously, the cassette tape was still intact. Realizing this was my time to put some art to work, I asked if I could use it for an art project. My logic was that if sound art is a human repellant, then it could also be a bear repellant.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The next week, the twins and I then went to work salvaging the speakers and various parts of the destroyed car. They said that if the bear revisited the audio from the tape or some version of the 'Subaru Miracle', it would get scared and run off before it could attack another car. I suggested we make sculptures that act as a non-violent repellent, a sit-in by machines in search of an ecological conscience.---------------------------------------------------
We then made a series of loudspeaker experiments that lined the perimeter of where the bears were known to live and played clips from the 'Land Motivationals' cassette on repeat.