Distributed Dance Body

Buga, Home of the Brave, Land of the Free

2025-05-26T00:00:00-07:00

In a group chat channel with old time friends, recently someone started sharing UFO theories. Youtube videos on the Buga Sphere started circulating, much to my annoyance. Just for amusement, I watched one of the videos.

The "scientists" on the video were running a microscope-camera on the surface of a shiny orb with undecipherable inscriptions, that looked like something scavenged from a movie set salvage store. They were pointing at the "inconfutable proof" that the orb contained advanced alien technology, i.e., fiber optic.

In the camera screen, dots with smaller circles arranged inside them could be seen, as cross sections of a man-made fiber strand. The "scientists" were saying that those surface dots were atmospheric sensors that were collecting and sending data. They also said that they could detect radio frequency right at that moment (which didn't surprise me, because the room was filled with cameras, laptops, and cell phones).

Among the dozens of scientific and historic inventions, the most egregious one was the statement that such fiber optic terminations could be sensors. A fiber optic is like a pipe or wire for light: an open termination of a single wire can only do two things: either send a point of environment light (with no image details) to a device, e.g., a sensor on the other end, or shoot light from a light source on the other end. And that's when it struck me.

I suddenly realized that I have a Buga sphere with me. It doesn't have the fancy inscriptions of the one in the video, but it's doing exactly that: shooting light. I have unlocked the secret of the Buga sphere. It's a disco light gifted to us by a benevolent alien race, who took pity at our disco ball technology, stuck in Saturday Night Fever nostalgia.

With all their good will, the "scientists" at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) studying the Buga sphere, filled with misconceptions, took a completely wrong turn. I can claim I have discovered its secret, and it's now hanging in the Ballroom of the Bureau of Minor Labors of Love where it is being put to use for the benefit of humankind. All the UNAM folks have to do is to stop messing with the fiber optic terminations, and find the switch.

How an alien artifact (the Philadelphia Sphere) made it to BMLL

It all began when I received a package from an unrecognized address.

Camera footage of a hooded figure, likely not human, delivering a package.

My security cameras caught the delivery "boy", who had a suspicious look and clearly a greenish skin hue.

Moments later, the creature was gone.

Camera footage of ghost or time traveller after delivering a package.

When I opened the package, it contained a shiny silver-like sphere, quite the same diameter as the one dropped off in Buga, Colombia.

The Philadelphia sphere unpacked and suspended for analysis.

Analysis of the Buga / Philadelphia Sphere

I immediately started analyzing the orb, and I discovered advanced technology inside it, similar to the one in the Buga Sphere.

The outer shell is made of an ultra-light aluminum alloy, with precision micro-drilled holes arranged in repeating patterns reminding of an elliptical galaxy; very likely the home place of the civilization that created the artifact.

An elliptical galaxy. Note the striking resemblance with the hole patterns in the Philadelphia Sphere.

High-intensity LEDs are used to project light out of the micro-drilled holes. I strongly suspect that a similar device is hidden in the Buga sphere.

The LEDs are arranged on a tree-like structure, with three "branches" extending out of a central axis, which is anchored to the poles of the sphere. Each of the "branches" is placed at a different distance between the axis and the outer shell, and at different angles. There are nine LEDs in total, three per branch, each projecting a different pattern due to the varying pitch and distance. All this structure is constructed out of pure aluminum.

Central tree with light sources in the shell.

Detail of central tree.

Complex wire network powering the light sources.

The central axis, and the way it projects light rays, is clearly a reference to the Tree of Life and Axis of the World celebrated in many ancient earthly cultures. This demonstrates a deep understanding of humankind by our benefactors, who are clearly sending us an encrypted message through this gift, to be interpreted only by people with good intentions.

The Tree of Life.

But the most revolutionary aspect of this object, which sets it apart from the Buga sphere and possibly places it in a more advanced technological context, is the rotational device that engages the whole central tree. The rotation is achieved via a high-precision motor that rotates at a slow and steady speed, anchored on the North pole of the shell, and an extremely quiet slip ring inside the South pole, that ensures a continuous supply of electricity to the LEDs while the device is rotating.

Detail of the ultra-stabilized motor.

Motor shaft inside the shell, that conveys rotation to the central axis. Note the precision anchor points and the laser (or plasma beam?) drilled shaft hole.

Detail of the slip ring mounted on an RFI protection cage. The edges of the cage have an irregular shape to capture and deflect various radio interference frequencies.

Slip ring with the axis mounted.

The technological advancement in this model is the absence of fiber optic. Since the light sources are rotating, the civilization that built this device had to find a solution to convey the light from the sources to the outside. And they came to a incredibly simple and effective solution: air.

Light travels through air in a straight line, and the combination of rotation and LED colors, positions, and pitch creates a pattern of many galaxies moving into space, colliding, overlapping, and blending with one another. It is possible that this device calculates the events of the Universe. A collaboration with the Harvard / Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is underway. The CFA will provide measurement devices and AI computation tools that will be able to predict the next asteroid collision that will scorch the Earth clean. In the meantime, the Sphere is being used for dance parties at BMLL.

The Buga / Philadelphia Sphere in action.

Reckoning with an anniversary

2021-09-04T00:00:00-07:00

The first sketch of DDB was presented a year ago at the 4th World Psychogeography Congress. Shortly thereafter, Elia, Jody, and Stefano started their weekly remote meetings that would give birth to Pocket Disco, and other realized and unrealized ideas. Early in the project we set the goal of reporting back about the project's evolution one year later at the same venue.

For 4WCOP 2021 we ran a panel discussion entitled "Distributed Disco Horizons". The session dealt with the theory behind DDB. From the pitch:

[…] infiltrating dance floors; rethinking contemporary dance with a primitive mindset; breaking and making circles; Pocket Discos as autonomous dance party units; pervasive DIY; pandemic-time “socially distanced” experiments by high-profile artists; post-pandemic opportunities to reshape social dancing; anarchist experiments; the art of midwifery; being sweaty, ridiculous and untethered.

This spoke to the core purpose of DDB, which is so far mainly, but not only, Pocket Disco. The untapped possibilities are still many.

As an accompanying event to the panel, Elia and Jody led an online Pocket Disco session where all participants would shine their makeshift disco lights made with colanders, bike lights, flashlights etc., and dance to the music.

Pocket Disco session at 4WCOP 2021: UK, Spain, New York, California.

Propositions for the next year: establish more frequent Pocket Disco sessions as alternatives to nightclubs (they really are something different); go back to the club scene with a new eye; and go from there with something new.

I used to not give a shit about Lady Gaga

2021-08-23T00:00:00-07:00

But then the thought came up, "Who's that one who sang Just Dance (I kept looking up Let's Dance and only Bowie came up)? And Poker Face? Oh, her again? I like how she says her name, ga-ga like a 10-month-old. And look, there is another interesting song or two..."

The rest was pretty repetitive, but those three songs made it to my Pocket Disco playlist and I have been exploring new ways of dancing to them since then.

What got me started on Lady Gaga was a karaoke party during a professional conference I was attending in LA (of all places) in 2016 (I tried to hijack some of the crowd to go dancing at La Cita without much success). The overly awkward atmosphere surrounding this kind of events, that everybody seems to forget about until it's too late to quit, got further exacerbated when someone requested and started singing Just Dance, clearly having forgotten what the lyrics were about and getting themselves more embarassed as they sang them. It was a glorious experience but I didn't think much of it afterwards. However, the idea kept brewing unnoticed for the following 5 years.

Lady Gaga's image is so far removed from my personal idea of DDB that engaging with it is a dangerously enticing challenge. The lyrics of Just Dance paint a quasi-apocalyptic scenario of Western college decay, as to invite to do the only reasonable thing one can do on the ruins of a party—and generation—that has spiralled into a bored, drunken oblivion:

Visuals go here.

Just dance, be a 10-month old as you step into the abyss of Pop music, where the only way to survive is to believe in its fiction for a moment. One cannot possibly dance to Madonna with abandon while she sings Music, makes the people come together / Music, makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel without believing earnestly in those words, as if it were the first time one hears something like that. In and out. It's refreshing. Timing is of the essence.

About whether this is legitimately contemporary dance theory, I care as much as I did for Lady Gaga a year ago.

Pocket Boom #2

2021-08-20T00:00:00-07:00

In my first Pocket Boom build I learned quite a few lessons, and came to the conclusion that a really efficient sound system was necessary.

Pocket Boom #2, initial assembly. The looks are quite rugged, but it will be banged around a lot.

I decided to ditch the stereo setup (what good is stereo if the speakers are so close to each other that you can't tell one from the other?) and found an extremely small (50x25mm) and inexpensive (~$6 in a board with basic circuitry) 60W mono amplifier, the Texas Instruments TPA3118. I also bought the most efficient loudspeaker I could find at a reasonable price that did not require a huge cabinet, the Dayton Audio PS65LP-4. Once nailed down these two key parts, the only one left was the power supply, which, as I had learned, is tightly related to the overall sound power and distortion control.

Since the beginning I wanted to make use of my DeWalt power tool batteries, of which I have a few that I use for my power tools and have a charger for. They are 20V which is a very good rating for the TPA3118. they are not extremely capable, but off-brand higher capacity packs are not that expensive. Also, switching them up would be a breeze.

As with Pocket Boom #1, assembly was very easy, with very minimal soldering required. I had found an adapter for DeWalt batteries that I carved a bay in the back panel for, so that batteries could be removed and attached easily.

The initial setup that I did for evaluation purposes did not involve a battery but used an external power adapter. The sound volume was many times grater than the one of the previous project. The sound came up clean even at ridiculously loud levels. The Dayton may be frowned upon by "audiophiles" because it's a car speaker, meant to fit in a car door and not in a cabinet. But since I did not care for "audiophile" quality, it turned out to be great for the purpose once I nailed down the right parameters for the enclosure.

Pocket Boom #2, back.

All controls are on the back. Very simple layout.

The difficult part came when I realized that my power tool batteries require a separate battery management system (BMS), which prevents the battery from burning out if it gets discharged below a critical level. That required some research and understanding of the problem, as well as a thorough modification of the DeWalt adapter that only had two connections, while I needed six for the BMS to work. Adding those contacts required some fine jewelry work on the part, but it turned out to work nicely at the end.

Pocket Boom #2, adding the BMS.

Pocket Boom #2, hacked in some extra contacts...

...and wires.

I never turned this thing up to the max because I didn't need to. I can hear it clearly playing in the backyard from the front of the house. Bass is not super strong so I wouldn't show off if any Jamaicans were around, but it's satisfactory. The bass reflex outlet spits out puffs of air that tickle your belly if you stand in front of it while playing Dennis Ferrer.

Pocket Boom #2, complete.

I believe I spent less than $150 for this, batteries excluded. It is many times more powerful and considerably smaller than the first project, because of the single speaker. One battery lasts over 6 hours at mild volume levels. Maybe next time I could use a battery pack as for Pocket Boom #1 because the adapter plus BMS was too much work for the advantage. But all in all I was so satisfied with it that I don't think I will need to do any improvements for a while. I even caved in to vanity and gave it a power light and a brass plate with its name. I'll need a leather suitcase handle because the cheap plastic one I found at the hardware store rattles at high volumes.

Descent Unto Valencia

2021-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

An Indo-European population ravaged through the Pontic steppe in the 7th century BC and beyond. In their early period of expansion, as they established the first nomadic empire of Asia by invading neighboring territories and absorbing their cultures in the process, up to the point of defeating Darius's most powerful Persian army, they led a lifestyle of extreme economy of means.

Their aesthetic language dictated by the constraints of a life on the move, Scythian people expressed their creativity in portable, practical objects of everyday life, most of which revolved around horses. Quite symbolically, their only architecture and stone sculpture manufacturing was reserved for burial sites.

It's all in there.

Stefano brought a home made boom box, a home made disco light, some reflective ribbon, and three days' change of clothes, carefully pressed into a backpack that fit within the "personal item" size (Ryanair is notoriously picky with size restrictions). Underwear and swimsuit were tucked inside the boom box, which needed a screwdriver to open, which could not go on the plane. Unlike the Scythians, we do not own some of our means of transportation and have to get extra creative with luggage design.

As we (Arron, Elia and Stefano) strolled around Valencia looking for a location, we ran into three young dancers in the City Hall square. The pavement was smooth marble. The boys were playing some electronic dance music and improvising duets, playing a sort of paper, rock, scissors game. After talking with them briefly, we laid our reflective ribbon around the area they were dancing in, and that magically turned it into a Pocket Disco session. That felt a lot like those '60s artists who put things on pedestals.

Valencia city hall.

The dancers kept on with their performance and their own music, and after some time we gradually joined in and started mixing in our music and sound system. Other people, maybe weight or ten passers-by, joined randomly. So far the non-planning part had worked great.

Valencia city hall.

La Ruta del Bakalao

The second and third day were dedicated to La Ruta del Bakalao. This was the name of a famed string of dance clubs on the south of the city that sprouted on the wake of la Movida, the euphoric period following the death of dictator Francisco Franco. This euphoria grew so big and chaotic that people would run 72-hour rave parties on heroin and metamphetamines along La Ruta, often times eventually crashing into other cars or flying into the rice fields along the road. In the '90s, as things got completely out of control, most clubs had to shut down. Some were later repurposed into tamer version of themselves; some others stand abandoned along the route like dionysian temples in ruins: with their edgy logo and architecture still visible from the highway, or their featureless, factory-like exterior only betrayed by a strange brown color, or outright razed down so that one could just barely guess the original footprint of the building.

Initially we thought we could spend the whole three days with something in between a 72-hour bicycle pilgrimage, camping out at night, and an archaeological expedition. But work schedule and the need for extra equipment to take some video documentation (as there would not be any strangers to engage with this time) made that unfeasible. Instead we chose four of the more iconic clubs of that period, researching and envisionig the kind of music they would play (each of the clubs catered to a different type of audience), and interpreting that with a single song.

The Face

Pretty much nothing remains of The Face, one of the hotspots of La Ruta that once stood right on the beach. We had to ask perople around to point out to us where it was, and a cracked concrete pavement, now used as a parking lot, was all that was left of the building. After a true Valencian experience with a paella on the beach and a swim, we were ready for a daytime dance party.

Paella on the jetty.

Incidentally, one thing that regularly happened on La Ruta was people turning on their car stereos and dancing in the clubs' parking lots while they were hanging around. Since The Face got bulldozed and turned into a parking lot, we could park our car and dance where the inside of the club used to be.

We danced to Fatima Yamaha's Araya covered by MEUTE.

The Face.

Penelope

The Penelope club logo used to be an ubiquitous car sticker all over Europe.

Slightly off La Ruta proper, Penelope was an iconic club in the '80s and '90s. It featured at least three bars and two dance floors, one very large with an elevated stage and a balcony with booths. Today it is completely abandoned in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by heaps of debris and trash in what used to be its vast parking lot. It is not boarded up and, surprisingly, not squatted, so entering it was extremely easy. Someone had come and taken all the stainless steel railings and other valuable materials; someone used it as a toilet and someone (else?) thought its walls were a great place to advertise their social media pages and hone their writing skills.

Penelope as seen from the street.

The entrance of the Penelope club.

Elia jumps on the cube right away.

What a mess.

Good thing we brought a palm leaf from the beach.

This place was so full of potential that we actually performed two pieces: one with Madonna's Hung Up on the stage, and one with Billy Idol's Neuromancer in a makeshift square made out of wooden boards that we had used to wipe off the debris off the smaller dance floor.

Penelope club, dancing to Madonna.

We have no idea how we are going to dance to this.

Penelope club, dancing to Billy Idol.

Chocolate

Chocolate was perhaps the most avant-garde club of La Ruta. In contrast to other major clubs nearby, such as Barraca which played relatively upbeat and mainstream dance music, Chocolate had a distinctively darker tone and leaned more toward hard techno (and hard drugs). Today it looks like a chocolate-brown monolith on the side of a two-lane highway, entombed and impenetrable, with some walls shaped in a waving pattern.

Chocolate.

As a homage to this place of experiment and excess, we performed the wildest of our sessions so far: in total darkness, we pointed Arron's car headlights toward the club walls; set our silver square in front of it; placed Grater Good Light in the middle of the square and the backup disco ball projecting onto the building. We played LCD Soundsystem's Yeah, a monumental, 9-minute Disco-Punk piece that starts deadpan and monotonic, and gradually turns into a delirious chaos of electronic noise. This was the only session for which we had a defined choreography, which was: dance like drunk frat brothers.

We actually couldn't do this if we had been drunk.

Yeah, let's kick up some dust.

And so we stomped and danced as bad as we could, kicking up as much dust as possible, until the headlights went out and we kept dancing to the disco lights and headlights of cars passing by on the highway, which slowed down to figure out what the hell was going on; some 40- or 50-year old might have thought that ghosts had been awakened.

The party is on.

Cars passing by.

Puzzle

Puzzle was probably even larger than Penelope, or so it seemed from the outside look and from the name; it was the first of the so-called "super clubs" in the area, which offered Texas-sized entertainment for thousands. It was not possible to get inside the abandoned building, at least not without a crowbar or grappling hooks, so we went for a "scenic shot" at sunset between the huge sign and the surrounding rice fields.

Arron and Elia contemplating the rice fields.

We played a classic piece that DJ Simó, resident DJ and later the owner of Puzzle, used to play at the closing of every night: Nina Simone's My Way. It was a slow and gentle movement (but lively enough to keep the mosquitoes away) and, so it felt, the most appropriate way to celebrate the end of a 20-year long night.

Puzzle Club.

Many thanks to Arron for the audiovisual documentation.

Pocket Boom #1

2021-06-19T00:00:00-07:00

I didn't really take Elia seriously when, after her first Pocket Disco session, she said that her sound system, one of those portable mini-speakers, was not loud enough for the open space environment they danced in. I thought that was just one of the compromises of being pocket-sized; if you want a loud soundsystem you have to go big. However, we mused about building our own sound system for Pocket Disco in a meeting.

Later on, talking with a British DJ, he would tell us how Jamaican DJs in Britain in the '80s and '90s got serious about building soundsystems for reggae and dub parties. They got especially competitive about reproducing deep bass, which in Rastafarian culture has a spiritual relevance. So we thought we weren't so far off the mark.

I thought I had a somewhat more powerful model of the same type speaker as Elia's that I would bring to San Diego. The result? Well, San Diego was a lot of fun but the music volume was definitely underwhelming. On my train ride back to LA I started researching about the most energy-efficient and compact amplifying circuits and ran into class D amplifiers.

The most obvious constraints were size, untethered power supply that would last for at least an hour of loud playback, and being powerful enough to be played without distorsion in an open and possibly noisy space. Thus, I turned to the all-knowing forum people for advice.

Class D amplifier chips are very cheap. Some need very little to no soldering to assemble. Battery packs are more expensive, and good quality, high-efficiency speakers (necessary to provide the volume) take most of the cost. I managed to build one system with a little more than the initial $150 budget. Assemblying it was very simple.

Pocket Boom #1, front.

Pocket Boom #1, back: input jack and power supply for recharging.

Pocket Boom #1, inside: 15W amplifier on the left, battery pack on the right.

It looks pretty cute, and the quality is good at lower volumes, but it really needs to be turned up to the max when outdoors, at which point it distorts a lot. It did an OK job in Valencia and fit into my backpack, but then I decided it to give it to my mom as a gift and build a more efficient one.

San Diego and the Art of Midwifery

2021-06-06T00:00:00-07:00

Turns out that Jody is directing a dance performance in San Diego in two weeks. "How far is San Diego from LA?" "We should do a Pocket Disco session". Settled.

The following two weeks are occupied by intense preparation: Jody working on her piece at the Trolley Station as well as scouting for locations, me getting materials and playlist together.

The playlist is 7 hours of all kinds of dance music, from Motown to the Chemical Brothers, from La Bouche to LCD Soundsystem, played on random. Whatever comes, comes.

Grater Good Light is completed in time for the event. There is a backup "stock" disco light for good measure. Everything fits in a camping backpack, which fits inside the milk crate on my bike, which goes with me on a train to San Diego.

The full setup at the San Diego Amtrak station.

After Jody's show, we do some final brief scouting and we settle under a great magnolia tree in a park. Then, while Jody attends the closing reception and spreads the word about an "after party", I go ahead and set up the disco light and perimeter. All in all it's a very simple process.

Then, everything blooms on its own accord. Dancers from Jody's group and other groups that performed in the festival start turning up. While I'm slapping my forehead for spending 10 minutes climbing on the tree to tape the disco light in the perfect spot and forgetting to turn it on, someone has just as fast climbed up the tree to do that.

I think Rachel is a tightrope performer, or something like that.

After I step away for a minute, as I walk back, everybody has already started. No one needed instructions or an introduction. There is music, a disco light, and a silver square on the grass... Duh.

Everybody takes their own vocabulary of figures they are comfortable with. Everybody is OK overdoing it, making mistakes and laughing about it. It is evident that the workshop with Jody built up some very good energy within the group, and now, after the performance, everybody is only thinking about relaxing and dancing however the hell they like.

Lisa trying to salvage Stefano by the tip of his shoe.

Jody and Lilian.

What is really touching is the respect that these dancers show for the perimeter, and the awareness of stepping in and out of the square, without anybody explaining what's so special about it.

Lilian and Rachel.

Couple Switch-over.

"It's not empty!"

Even old Grater Good Light, who had been sitting in a corner trying not to get involved because it's so rickety and cobbled together in a pinch, gets grabbed, turned on and shaken about.

Alexa and Rachel shaking up Grater Good Light.

Eventually, as dusk sets, even the only rule of Pocket Disco ("Two at a time") gets broken as we turn Pocket Disco into a mini-disco.

Dancing to the Rolling Stones.

It feels good to work with people again after a year of lockdown. Sometimes just being the midwife, by making sure that timing is right, everybody is at ease for the event, and ensuring that there is a supply of clean towels, is all it takes to make a piece.

Grater Good Light

2021-06-05T00:00:00-07:00

Building your own disco light may be daunting but it is the utmost goal of a Pocket Disco experience. If done right, its beauty can outshine any and all mass-produced disco lights.

As with most things DDB, this all started in one of our meetings. At a certain point, Ute pulled up a pasta colander, stuck a flashing bike light in it, and that made a disco light. Jody prompted everybody to get some kitchenware and flashlights, so we did that, shut all the blinds and started dancing with these makeshift lights.

Then Elia saw some cheese graters and light bulbs hanging on a shop window and wrote that "it makes me think of us". That was it. We were going to build disco balls and lights out of shiny kitchenware.

This is how our meetings look like.

Grater Good Light Live San Diego.

Hanging Graters, Valencia.

That's the happy side of the story. The tough part is that bike lights are just powerful enough to be looked at, but not enough to project light beams on surfaces. To do that with an untethered system, you need high-power LEDs, which are very hungry creatures, very sensitive to current fluctuations. They need capable batteries and measured resistors to prevent burnout. They also give out a lot of heat and need good heat sinks.

Grater Good Light, rotating element with LEDs. The aluminum support acts as a heat sink.

Also, even the fanciest combination of colored lights and hole patterns does not resemble a disco ball without movement. Transmitting power to the rotating element requires a rotating electrical joint, or slip ring. For a "quick" prototype, ball bearings may be used but only if set up with an element that ensures a continuous contact. The greased moving parts in the bearings don't provide a reliable contact, cause arcing and make the LED flicker and wear out quickly.

Grater Good Light, contact bearings

Grater Good Light, bearings with contact hack

Once these technical issues are resolved, the core rotating element can be made to fit inside any object that is shiny and has holes. Two pasta colanders or steamer baskets resemble a disco ball the most, but the cheese grater is much more compact to take around, and also gives a different light pattern on each side.

Not quite shock proof, but solid enough to be taken around for a brief spin:

Alexa and Rachel take Grater Good Light for a ride in San Diego.

I actually had to stop this because the light started flickering and was likely shorting, and I didn't want anybody's hair to catch on fire. But the half minute it lasted for paid off for the weeks of work spent on it.

Discoteca de Bolsillo (Pocket Disco), May 2021, Valencia

2021-05-21T00:00:00-07:00

Instructions for a Pocket Disco seeder:

Contact friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Express your desire to set up an ephemeral, outdoor dancefloor. Pocket Disco has the power to filter people into two categories: those who enthusiastically join any kind of plan—the more bizarre the better—and those who need carefully drafted, structured, one-month-planned-ahead evenings. Go with the first ones for a successful Pocket Disco, leave the latter for relaxing meriendas. Once the first and most important selection is over, build up some enthusiasm by asking the (self)chosen ones to pick some of the songs that will feed the playlist. If you can meet to create the playlist together the party will start days or hours earlier. The pre-pocket disco is a party on its own, a fundamental yet invisible part of it. Share yummy snacks and drinks, bring glitter for everyone and dust your old eyeshadow palette (this time we applied it with both sides of a cheap watercolor brush. Anything will go). At dusk, herd the pocket community to the chosen location for Pocket Disco. If nice weather accompanies, bikes and skates are strongly encouraged as transportation means. If you happen to be in Spain, everyone will have an incomparable "Verano Azul" feeling. If you are not, I'm sure similar images will come to mind and heart:

Verano Azul.

Once within the Pocket Disco squared, taped perimeter, dance to exhaustion, dance without shyness, dance in gratitude.

DDB Valencia Playlist

DDB Valencia Backstage

This is an Anarchist Experiment

2021-04-22T00:00:00-07:00

In one of our latest meetings, as I was summarizing the organization of DDB to a newcomer, I found myself defining DDB as an "anarchist experiment". Which, after a good night's sleep, seems like a fitting term. Hence this little article.

DDB is inherently decentralized. It has no appointed global leaders: whoever shows up at our weekly meetings gets to make decisions and discuss the direction of the group; whoever organizes a session in their area is completely in charge of it. The three "founding members" are such just because they met by chance and, so far, nobody else has stepped up to join our discussion regularly yet.

No background of any kind is required to join or to organize a local session, except for the will to gather one or two partners and "do it". Bad dancers are as good as good dancers.

Most importantly, DDB can be carried forward with almost no money and minimal planning. The means required to organize a local session are minimal, the rules of the game extremely simple, and if someone lacked even the minimal means to get started, other members with more means could help.

This does not mean that someone cannot use e.g. Pocket Disco to apply for grants, participate in festivals, organize more complex setups with more money, etc., i.e. integrating DDB with their professional creative activity, and even use DDB as a PR tool for financially sustainable projects. While that is not the goal of DDB, it is not incompatible with it. The only requirement is that people get to dance with the original spirit of the project in mind and let us know that they are doing that.

The idea of DDB and its derivatives, such as Pocket Disco, are not owned by anybody. They can be reused and reinterpreted. We only kindly ask to share their documentation with us so that we may publish and advertise it through our channels.

Once an idea leaves an individual's mind and is communicated, it is extremely hard and resource-consuming, and even pointless, to keep it within any physical and virtual boundaries and prevent it from mixing with other ideas. Therefore DDB will not claim any intellectual ownership of any idea, since those ideas have long left the boundaries of their creators' minds and have already become something else.

In short, DDB offers the millionth-flavour of the Anarchist Utopia, so widely theorized long before these two words even existetd. The only possible concrete Utopia must necessarily be not universal and not permanent. DDB is a fleeting space near you that you can use to exercise your individual freedom, before returning to the daily churn of professional life. People who meet in such space may have nothing in common but the free exchange and breeding of new information, experience and ideas. DDB does not seek the overthrowing of social or political systems, or the achievement of a global Utopia; it simply provides a space which is vital to maintain human biodiversity, and which has always been destroyed and rebuilt under different names and shapes, and as such has always existed.

Discoteca de Bolsillo (Pocket Disco) Session Zero, Valencia

2021-03-03T00:00:00-08:00

Elena Marinova and I went on our very first DDB (Discoteca de Bolsillo) foray in our hometown, Valencia, on 3 March. The city has the largest urban park in Spain, a dry riverbed crossed by several bridges—which make for great amplifiers—so we decided to do our set up under a 15th century bridge. Its inward curved design provided an enveloping space with a hint of "rave" character.

The DDB consisted of:

a loudspeaker,
a square made of fluorescent pink adhesive tape,
and a battery powered mini disco ball.

Elena was great at setting up the mood suggesting we dressed up for the occasion and put some glitter on our eyelids. I realize I’ve been missing this cheerful silliness.

Our Playlist included Nathy Peluso, Moon Hooch, Rosalia and Gnarls Barkley, among others.

This was an initial exploration of the location which proved to have much potential for longer sessions involving more people.

DDB Valencia March Poster

Pocket Disco Valencia 21 March 2021

Star ball mop

2021-01-18T00:00:00-08:00

star ball mop

Original DDB Manifesto

2020-12-18T00:00:00-08:00

From the transcript of an improvised lightning talk at the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography:

In 2018 I moved to Los Angeles from Chicago, took a job with less responsibilities than I had before, triggered the beginning of the end of my marriage, quit workohol cold-turkey, and started rethinking my creative processes.

I started going to dance clubs. Methodically, area by area, I would research venues, spend the night dancing, and write down all the details, both factual and ineffable, in a diary. I did this every 2-3 weekends, writing my notes on the bus to the venue and enjoying late night conversation with random rideshare drivers on the way back.

The core concept of my project was rediscovering dancing in urban venues as a hidden link to a primordial body language that is normally repressed during normal civil interaction.

After about a year I was ready to take the project to the next step. I drafted a Craigslist announcement looking for dance club partners to “tear the dance floor to shreds”. As I was ready to post the ad, I realized COVID-19 had gotten out of control.

You can’t have this kind of dance event with the virus. These are now times for reflection and planning. And, after much reflection and planning, and after attending the first day of 4WCOP, I knew what to do.

The pandemic will eventually go away. When the clubs reopen, there shall be a worldwide distributed dance company ready to reclaim those spaces from social drinking and conversation; to strip them bare; to convert them into theaters of joyous, creative Chaos.

Such company shall be made up of people with or without dancing experience; in either case, they shall leave their skills behind. The more they dance like idiots, the better. The company shall take over the sacred space of the dance floor not in a brutal or provocative way, but by transporting regular citizens who came there for a regular chat and a drink into a whirlwind that lasts a couple of hours and won’t be televised.

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